Ruby/RoR in NetBeans made headlines three years ago, but after Sun was acquired by Oracle there where fears that support for dynamic languages would suffer, as this IDE would be downsized. This has become a reality, since as of version 7, NetBeans will no longer support Ruby.
The NetBeans team announced that their main reason for dropping Ruby was the fact that their resources are limited and they’d like to focus on supporting the next major release of Java SE:
Java SE 7 and Java Development Kit 7 (JDK 7) are the next major releases of the Java SE platform, which Oracle is committed to deliver in 2011. A key objective of the NetBeans IDE has always been to offer superior support for the Java platform. To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes--multi-language support, developer productivity and performance--it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to a timely and quality release of NetBeans IDE 7.0.
Regarding human resources, it is important to note that one of main figures behind the NetBeans “version 6 renaissance”, Tor Norbye, has left the company recently after the acquisition, as has Sun’s original JRuby team.
The NetBeans team, also claimed that the NetBeans IDE was not a big success in the Ruby community in the last three years, so it wouldn’t make sense to continue working on it:
Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature.
After this development, the NetBeans/Ruby support will become a community project, much like Python support, which was abandon before getting into prime-time NetBeans.
As for the rest of the dynamic languages, it seems that PHP and Groovy support will continue to be developed by Oracle, in version 7 of Netbeans, which is planned for April 2011.
Ruby developers that used NetBeans, might consider switching to other products like RubyMine, Aptana, RedCar, etc.
What IDE/editor are you using for Ruby/RoR development?
