Rory Hansen

ActiveState, a local Vancouver company that I’d only previously known about because of ActivePerl, has just released Kodomo 3.5, an IDE that now supports Ruby. Sadly, Windows and Linux versions are still only in beta, but I’ve signed up to beta test the IDE as I’m eagerly trying to replace Dreamweaver as my Ruby on Rails text editor.

The ActiveState highlights the following Kodomo 3.5 features:

• Fully-integrated Ruby support
• Ruby on Rails debugging
• Code intelligence
• Cross-platform
• Highly customizable
• Supports multiple languages

Of these features, the two I’m most looking forward to using are code intelligence and debugging. My current method for debugging my Rails apps is pretty amateurish, I’ll admit, as usually I’ll just output values to the console window to see what’s going on. I know that Rails has the ability to set breakpoints and debug in a more structured manner, but it all reminds me too much of GCD. I hope that the debugging facilities in Kodomo are more like those contained within VisualStudio.NET, as I’ve come to appreciate the convenience of using a nice GUI for debugging.

Anyway, the 28MB download for my Windows version of Kodomo 3.5 beta is nearly complete, so I’ll end this post here. I hope to have a decently complete review of my opinions of Kodomo online in a few days, so check back then.