Wednesday, September 12, 2007

InfoWorld Bossies Close to my Heart

A couple interesting "Bossies" were awarded by InfoWorld this week:
  • Best Open Source Programming Language - Summary: Ruby gets mad props for a vibrant community and a diverse range of implementations (e.g. JRuby), and then they go squishy and say "and these other languages are great too!"
  • Best Open Source IDE - InfoWorld heaps praise on NetBeans largely because it has *not* gone the way of an amorphous, all-encompassing "platform" and has continued to take risks to improve the overall experience of the IDE. Before the work on NetBeans 6 (don't download M10; use a daily build) I was a nay-sayer myself; having used NetBeans 6 for many months now, I can honestly say it's far better than NetBeans 5.5 and has caught up or passed Eclipse in many ways. There's more to do, but I'm extremely impressed with the progress.
I try not to be too much of a Sun marketing shill, but both Bossies are pretty close to my heart. JRuby has been my passion for three years now, and NetBeans has taken a serious about face with greatly improved Java support and best-in-class Ruby support. It's good to see some recognition for hard work.

2 comments:

  1. I'm with you on NetBeans. It's a joy to use, mostly. There are a couple stumbling blocks on Linux. Setting up the fast Ruby debugger takes effort. If you're on Ubuntu, be sure to build Ruby 1.8.6 rather than using what's in the package archive. Also, you may need to set the GEM_PATH env var or NB won't know where your gems are.

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  2. Ok ok, you've talked me into it...(begrudingly surrendering to NetBeans)

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