RE: [FR-devel] (no subject)

[Curt Hibbs]

Jay Handfield wrote:
> Well I am a software developer in New York City.  At work I
> mostly do server
> side Java stuff on a mostly XP programming team.

This is good. We need more people who are experience with XP. One of the
goals of FreeRIDE is to include features that directly support XP practices.

> In my spare time I have been working on Eclipse plugins and a Java GUI
> written with SWT.  While I have been very impressed with the design and
> implementation of Eclipse and SWT, after working for a while I began to
> strongly suspect that Java  is far from the ideal language to
> write GUIs in
> no matter how the good the design?  At about the same time, I came across
> Ruby and like many others had the immediate feeling that it does almost
> everything right.  When I saw that someone was working on an eclipse-like
> IDE, I wanted to contribute.

Excellent! There will be no lack of interesting areas in which you can
choose to contribute.

> Since I am very new to Ruby and client-side application design (as well as
> being very busy at work), I don't think I will be able to
> contribute much to
> the architecture/core coding, but I am hoping I will be able to play a
> support role of some kind with testing, documentation, or packaging.

Any contribution you are able to make will be greatly appreciated. FreeRIDE
will be a very long term project. Out of necessity (and following the XP
practice of "release early, release often"), FreeRIDE will start out simple.
But over time we will implement more and more of its high-end features.

Don't worry about being new to Ruby. I am one of the initial founders of the
FreeRIDE project, I only discovered Ruby about 5 months ago, and my first
non-trivial Ruby coding has been in FreeRIDE, itself! (Like you I get paid
for doing Java work, but was searching for a better way).

Anyway, just feel free to hang out and observe what's going on. Sooner or
later, some piece of FreeRIDE will just call out to you and say "write me,
write me", you won't be able to resist and before you know it, you will bang
out your first FreeRIDE plugin!

Anyway, welcome to the group!

Curt