appendixC. Tools and Utilities

appendix C. Tools and Utilities

When all you have is a hammer , everything looks like a nail.

Abraham Maslow

The modern programmer typically has a small arsenal of tools at his disposal to make his job easier. These may include everything from simple debuggers to full integrated development environments (IDEs).

At the time of this writing, there is rather a shortage of such tools for Ruby. This situation, of course, will continue to improve as time goes on.

Everything here can be found in the Ruby Application Archive. Begin at the Ruby home page (www.ruby-lang.org), which will always link to the archive.

We present here an overview of many of the tools that are available as of summer 2001.

We've divided these items into five categories: Programming aids, RAD tools and IDEs, miscellaneous interactive tools, Ruby online documentation, and documentation aids. To learn about any of these, a Web search is your best bet for up-to-date information.

Programming Aids

Note that the debugger and the profiler are part of the standard distribution.

• The Ruby debuggerThe library debug.rb is invoked by a -rdebug on the command line; this gives access to a command-line debugger similar to gdb and its ilk.

• YARD (Yet Another Ruby Debugger)This is an enhanced debugger that can be used to attach to programs running remotely.

• The Ruby profilerUsing -rprofile on the command line will produce profiling output detailing numbers of method calls, time in seconds, and so on.

• RubyUnitThis is a unit-testing framework based on junit .

• LapidaryAnother unit-testing framework, this based on sunit instead.

• RubiconThis test suite is primarily useful for verifying that the Ruby installation behaves as expected. If you use development versions of Ruby (rather than stable versions), you might want this package.

• swigrubyThis is a Ruby-aware version of SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator), which glues C/C++ to Ruby.

RAD Tools and IDEs

Ruby doesn't yet have any truly mature Rapid Application Development tools or IDEs. Expect this category to grow.

• SpecRubyThis tool assists in creating Tk interfaces.

• Ruby/LibGladeThis tool by Avi Bryant assists in creating interfaces with GTK; it supersedes the older Glade/Ruby by Yasushi Shoji.

• Gem FinderThis tool by Jim Weirich is a simple graphical class browser, displaying useful information about subclasses, superclasses, methods , and so on.

Ruby Online Documentation

These are all various forms of online Ruby documentation. (By "online," we mean softcopy, not necessarily Web-based.)

• ri This command line utility summarizes information about classes, modules, and methods specified as parameters.

• myri This is a GTK-based GUI version of the ri utility.

• Programming Ruby by Thomas and HuntThis book, the first Ruby book in English, is available on the Web in a downloadable form and as a Windows help file.