NetBeans Community Announces Support for Ruby and JRuby Programming Languages

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and the NetBeans Community, today announced an early access release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack which provides support for the Ruby programming language. The NetBeans plug-in offers developers added support for dynamic and scripting languages and includes editing features for both Ruby and JRuby - a 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.


The NetBeans Ruby Pack goes beyond basic editing, syntax highlighting, navigation outline, project support and unit test execution to provide developers with a rich set of features to enhance productivity. These features include: code completion for modules, classes, methods and escape codes within literal strings and regular expressions. The NetBeans Ruby Pack also offers extended features such as integrated documentation pop-ups for Ruby API calls, semantic analysis with highlighting of parameters and unused local variables, as well as occurrence highlighting.

"Developing these plug-ins for NetBeans is yet another demonstration of our commitment to support dynamic languages," said Jeet Kaul, vice president for Developer Products and Programs, Sun Microsystems. "NetBeans -- with its broad adoption -- now extends its reach into a new community of users while exposing the existing Java development community to the power of the Ruby language. Building this synergy is what makes open-source a powerful strategy for aligning and moving the technology industry forward."

Ruby support is available for NetBeans 6 Milestone 7 as a download from the Autoupdate Center. Additional support for Ruby on Rails is expected to be available mid-year 2007.

Make plans to join us on May 7th for the fourth annual NetBeans Day that will be held the day before the 2007 JavaOne conference event, speakers will include: Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo and Tor Norbye.