Using JRuby's "complete" JAR for OS X App Bundles

Now this is really cool. Tony Hursh, commenter on the previous "Advanced Rails Deployment" post, put together an OS X Application Bundle template that allows you to use the JRuby "complete" JAR file as the base of a typical OS X app. What does that mean? That means you just toss the complete JAR into this template, code up some Ruby code, and have a nice dock icon and menu bar like any other app. You can ship the entire app as a bundle, with JRuby as the built-in Ruby interpreter. Awesome.

Some pics showing the menu working like you'd expect and the JRuby logo as a dock icon:





Check out Tony's JRuby OS X App Bundle walkthrough to see for your self. It's a really outstanding application of JRuby's "Ruby-in-a-JAR" support.

Eclipse to NetBeans: Quick Outline Module

I'm trying to be 100% NetBeans these days, and I'll be documenting tips and tricks as I learn them. Hopefully others going through the same exercise will find these tips and they'll help make the transition smoother.

Why am I making this move, you ask? Well, of course there's the whole fact that I work for Sun, but that's not the primary motivation; if a tool doesn't accomplish what I want, I'm not going to use it. But NetBeans has made amazing strides this past year. It's now not only better-looking and faster than Eclipse, it also includes includes a much, much larger set of functionality in the base download. And that download? 30-60MB smaller than Eclipse 3.2. That's pretty amazing.

Anyway, one feature I sorely missed was the "Quick Outline" in Eclipse, where Command-O (or Ctrl-O) brings up a fast search for members of the current class. It's pretty darn useful, and I really, really missed it.

However, Sandip Chitale to the rescue. He's created a "Java File Structure" module, which exactly duplicates the Quick Outline functionality. Thank goodness!

Read Sandip's post to install the NetBeans Quick Outline module (Java File Structure) and try it for yourself. He's also got a quick Java class hierarchy module that looks great, but it's not something I use very often. Perhaps I will use it more now.

Oh, and you can find information about the modules in Help after they're installed, but to save you some confusion: The shortcut for File Structure is initially Cmd-Shift-S (Ctrl-Shift-S) and for Hierarchy is Cmd-Shift-H (Ctrl-Shift-H).

One more NetBeans annoyance down the drain!