Institute for
HSR

Ruby Refactoring

Team:

 

Initial Status

Ruby is a dynamically typed, object oriented programming lanugage, that boomed enormously in recent years, mostly because of the web framework Rails. The support to the developer through a powerful integrated development environment is still in its infancy. There are several editors, which mostly don't provide more than syntax highlighting, code outline and a rudimentary project management. There is no environment that provides anything like automated refactorings.
The Ruby Development Tools (RDT), based on the Eclipse platform, is a relative highly developed Ruby development environment. RDT is also the basis for the Rails plug-in RadRails.

Aims

The aim of the Ruby Refactoring Project is to provide a wide variety of refactorings for the development environment RDT.

Results

During the very successful project work, the following refactorings were implemented:

 
  • Convert Local Variable to Field
  • Encapsulate Field
  • Extract Method
  • Move Method
  • Move Field
  • Split Temporary Variable
  • Inline Method
  • Inline Class
 		  
  • Inline Temp
  • Merge Class Parts
  • Rename Class
  • Rename Field
  • Rename File
  • Rename Local Variable
  • Rename Method
  • Rename Module
 

Feedback

Daniel Spiewak of EclipseZone wrote:

First class Ruby refactoring is probably the most vaunted feature in RDT 0.9 and I must admit, it's very impressive. In this area, DLTK simply can't compare (it doesn't have any refactoring support yet). I was able to rename classes, methods, variables, mark occurrences (not really a refactoring, but it requires the same AST), and even wrap a code block in a method (I thought that one was pretty cool). There are even more refactorings, but you get the picture.

Links

Screencasts

Documentation

Download and Installation

Our refactoring plug-in is integrated into RDT. So to get our refactorings, you can just download RDT/RadRails from Aptana.