Prashant's Perceptions

SXDE 1/08: First Solars Release that includes Ruby

SXDE 1/8(or the more wordy Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/8) was released two weeks ago, and this is the first Solaris release to have the Ruby programming language available as an operating system feature.

Expect to find it as /usr/ruby/1.8/bin, and linked from /usr/bin/ruby. We used the /usr/ruby/1.8 location to be friendly to different Ruby versions. ie., when version 1.9 comes out, expect to find it in /usr/ruby/1.9/bin.

Rubygems is also included in this release. So that should make it quite simple to be up-and-running with Ruby development . . . did I hear you ask about an IDE?
Well, the famous Netbeans, with built-in Ruby support, is available in Solaris express. Netbeans has been getting so many good reviews these days for it's Ruby support. This release allows you to choose between the native Ruby and jruby for your projects . . . cool.

What's on the roadmap?

Now that we have the Ruby platform, extensions, and Rubygems - the next step is to integrate the Rails stack.
This should also be available as IPS packages for OpenSolaris Indiana.

DTrace support should be available earlier than that, and Gems for MySQL and Postgres should be available along with Rails.

Expect to see these components go into the Solaris Express Community Edition(or Nevada) builds in the near future.

Oh, if you need Ruby/Rails for Solaris 10 - then use Coolstack. This doesn't come with the OS, but needs you to execute a simple pkgadd command to install it. It installs Ruby into /opt/coolstack.

Posted at 01:51PM Feb 15, 2008 by prashant in Ruby  |