



Today we released Komodo 4.3.0 Alpha 1, which contains a number of major new features and a durn lot of bug fixes. You can download it from here:
Windows:
http://downloads.activestate.com/Komodo/Windows/4.3/
Mac OS X:
http://downloads.activestate.com/Komodo/MacOSX/4.3/
Linux:
http://downloads.activestate.com/Komodo/Linux/4.3/
The major highlights of this release are:
Please see the Komodo 4.3 new features page for more detail and some nice screenshots:
http://community.activestate.com/komodo-4-3-features
You can find the list of features requests that were implemented and all of the bugs that got resolved in the 4.3 release here:
Enjoy,
Todd Whiteman
"Komodo Roper"
I'll try the alpha right away. When can we expect the final version?
Currently we are aiming to make 4.3.0 final towards the later half of Feburary 2008.
Cheers,
Todd
I tried the new release today. Overall it seems production quality stable - I had absolutely no issues with it. I was very pleased with the new "Find", haven't had the time to play with the unit testing integration. You should update Komodo's documentation to reflect these new features - I quickly skimmed the current doc - it had nothing in it about the unit testing integration. One thing disappointed me though - the rails support seems to be just the same as it was in 4.2. I thought that you said you plan to update Komodo Rails soon to better support the new features of Rails 2.
1. Generating a rails project now hardwires MySQL support in the database.yml file
2. The script/console command has been fixed on Windows and Linux for Rails 2.0 -- it works fine as is on the Mac.
3. The generate-scaffold command has an updated caption
4. File associations for *.html.erb files have been added.
The tools work fine with Rails 2.0, apart from the above.
I plan on adding unit tests for the various Rake commands as well.
Is there anything specific you'd like to see for Rails 2 support?
I wanted to see the four things you listed + support for the new database management rake tasks added in Rails 2. Check them out here. I find them most useful.
Also, I'd like to ask you to consider Merb support for the next version of Komodo. Merb is very hot right now and will get much hotter once the stable release is out in a couple of months. There are already some books in the works for this exciting new framework and Ruby devs tend to agree that it will be a viable alternative to Rails. Considering the fact that the management of a Merb project is very similar to that of a Rails project, the creating a of Merb template will probably the a relatively easy task. It would be nice to see Komodo one step ahead of the competition in the adoption of new technologies.
I saw a demo of Merb a couple of weeks ago, and it does look good.
As the speaker kept switching from textmate to iterm, I was thinking
that it shouldn't be too hard to duplicate the Rails toolkit for
Merb, certainly easier than building a separate toolkit for a framework
for one of the other languages.
Since Merb was conceived as a Rails replacement and since it strives to be appealing and familiar to Rails devs, it shares quite a few trends with Rails - project generation, models/controllers generation, migrations and so on. You can check out a tutorial such as this if you haven't actually played with Merb and you'll see for yourself. The way I see it creating a Merb toolkit from the existing Rails toolkit won't involve much more work than the work you had to do to update the toolkit to work properly with Rails 2.
I'll add some more thoughts on the Rails 2 toolkit. I would be nice if start server opened a tab, instead of a separate console. The separate console is easy to close by accident, takes additional space on the desktop and makes us switch between it and Komodo. Also the toolkit currently has "Create Databases" and "Delete Databases" tools in the root of Rails Tools. If you add the new actions as db:reset and db:create:dbname it would probably be best if they went in their own virtual sub-folder. Also, isn't "Drop databases" a more appropriate name with regard to common convention(call me annoying, but I just tend to pay a lot of attention to small details).
Btw, I started playing with Komodo extensions these past few days and if I have the time I'll try to create some additional helper tools for Rails devs. This is the real beauty of Komodo - it's so easy to extend it in so many ways...