My Interview with Huw Collingbourne up on InfoQ

I have been a happy Ruby in Steel user for quite a while now and have built a bit of a rapport with Huw Collingbourne, co-founder of SapphireSteel Software, the developers of Ruby in Steel.

On Monday, SapphireSteel Software released a new version of Ruby in Steel, version 1.2.  This version includes a new Visual Rails Workbench that allows developers to create Ruby on Rails applications visually as Visual Studio developers have come to expect.

From the Ruby in Steel web site:

The principal features of the Visual Rails Workbench are:

Full page editing of complete web pages (composites of Rails layouts/views/partials)
Drag and Drop design – add controls from a toolbox
Set properties using the Property panel
Resize and move controls using mouse or keyboard
Split view code/form editing
Toggle ERb/RHTML editing between HTML editor and Rails (Ruby-aware) editor
Round-tripping between ‘web format’ HTML and ‘Rails format’ ERb/RHTML
Edit code as ERb/RHTML or as HTML
Document Navigator navigates document structure (HTML)/or methods (ERB/Ruby)
Quick navigation between controller and view
Import/Export to other web page design tools such as Dreamweaver
Save/restore named ‘versions’ of page designs to/from an archive of work in progress
Auto-backup of changes to templates
Support for Rails 1 and Rails 2

The Visual Rails Workbench is one of several significant new additions to Ruby In Steel 1.2.

Other notable features include:

JRuby Support Users may run and debug Sun’s Java-based JRuby right inside the Ruby In Steel environment.
IronRuby Support Ruby In Steel is the only IDE to offer integrated form design for Microsoft’s IronRuby (currently ‘alpha’).
Enhanced Debugging Ruby In Steel has the fastest debugger for standard Ruby. In addition to all its existing capabilities (such as breakpoints, watch variables, call stack navigation, step into/out/over, locals, autos, drill-down debugging and debugging into ERb/RHTML templates)

Ruby In Steel 1.2 adds the following debugging features:

• Tracepoints
• Conditional breakpoints
• Break on hitcount
• Run macro on break
• Break on exception
• Autos window user-configuration
• Dynamic debugging (evaluate code and change variable values on the fly)

I had the opportunity to chat with Huw about Visual Rails Workbench for the interview which can be read at InfoQ.