Wednesday July 18, 2007

My previous blog entry discussed the new Quick Fix feature for Ruby in NetBeans. Today, I'd like to invite you all to jump in and add your own quick fixes! Nothing (with some notable exceptions...) could be more fun! Writing a quickfix is easy, fairly self-contained (so it's easy to get started), and the resulting feature has high user visibility and utility. Thus, I think it's a great way to join an open source project and have some fun. Besides, working on tools is extra rewarding since at the end of the day, as a programmer you get to use the stuff you're building in your day-to-day work!

I've written a bunch of "Getting Started" documentation for how to write your own hints. The main starting point is is the How to Write a Hint document, which tells you everything you need to know. Look it over and see if you get inspired! If so, follow these steps:

• Check out the code and build the IDE (as described here).
• Read more information on how to join the project (license requirements etc.)
• If you want to write other code than just hints, check out the code ideas document.
• If some of the documentation is not clear, please let me know or ask on dev@ruby.netbeans.org - or if you know how to improve it, edit it directly!

I hope to see some of you on dev@ruby.netbeans.org soon!

Here are some hint ideas to get you started (a more up to date list is in the hint-howto wiki page):

• Offer to replace a { } block with a do-end and vice versa (unless it's a single-line block where braces are most common)
• Look for typos: incorrect spelling of "initialize", or perhaps an assignment to a variable that is close in spelling to another symbol
• Offer to add parentheses to a code construct where the lack of parentheses results in ambiguity (such as nested method calls without parentheses)
• Offer to remove parentheses where that's okay (some developers prefer not to use them)
• Offer non-Railsy deprecations: Use fileutils instead of ftools, cgi instead of cgi-lib, avoid importenv, ... Anything else?
• Offer to remove unused variables (the left hand side of the assignment, or if the right hand side is known not to have side effects, the entire statement)
• Style warnings: Using method names containing uppercase/camelcase names, or constants containing lowercase characters
  • Camelcase warnings should perhaps not kick in for projects enabled for Java API calls (e.g. with JRuby)
• Offer to fix various code style violations - see one example style guide, here's another, and yet another
  • As an example, replace x = y = whatever with x=whatever newline y=whatever (codestyle recommending this)
• Split multiple statements on a line into separate lines (I have this for defs and classes but x=y; foo should be splittable.)
• (JRuby projects) For an unknown class, check the Java index and offer to "import" the Java class into the Ruby name space
• Tell us your own ideas!