Oracle pulls Ruby on Rails support from NetBeans 7.0

Oracle's NetBeans developers have announced that they are removing support for Ruby on Rails from the Java IDE NetBeans 7.0.

Oracle said it had decided to remove the Ruby on Rails support because of relatively low usage and that the limited development resources available were better focused on providing Java SE 7 and JDK 7 support in NetBeans 7.0, scheduled fro release in April. The Ruby on Rails support in NetBeans is incorporated in a single "Ruby" module, so the move will see the complete removal of Ruby support from NetBeans.

The change will be put into effect in development builds from January 27th and the NetBeans developers recommend that users who wish to continue using NetBeans and Ruby stay on NetBeans 6.9.1. The developers say they strongly encourage the NetBeans Ruby community to take over the development of the Ruby and Ruby on Rails support; NetBeans is a modular IDE and Ruby support is a plug-in language module which sits alongside the other language support modules for Java (SE, EE and ME), C/C++, PHP and Groovy.

JetBrains, makers of the commercial Ruby IDE RubyMine, said in a tweet, that it welcomed NetBeans Ruby users and would be announcing some "great news" soon on its pricing page. RubyMine is already available for free to developers of open source projects. Other Ruby IDEs include the, still in-development, Redcar which is written in Ruby and Aptana's open source RadRails.

(djwm)