Thursday, January 11, 2007

Refactoring Ruby

Over in my 2007 Ruby prediction post on Linux Journal, I wrote:

Refactoring tools — This is something I think there's just too much clamor for (and too much momentum toward) not to hit in 2007. The JRuby team is making steady progress in NetBeans and Eclipse while wierd, wonderful things are being done with code rewriting on top of ParseTree and other tools. This year, we'll be able to stop saying "Yeah, there aren't any tools, but Ruby is still really easy to refactor."
At the time, I had absolutely no clue that Jay Fields, et al. were going to translate Refactoring into Ruby.

I'd done a translation of the code and the refactorings in the first chapter myself when I was first learning Ruby. It was a great way to figure some things out. I'm really excited to hear that they're working on the whole book though (not just translating, they're going to include some Ruby specific refactoring and other content). I think this is great news.

Here's the original news break and here's a look at the beginning of the book. I'd love to know more about the project, hopefully Jay will keep posting updates (as well as the promised translation).

Super special thanks go to Martin Fowler for giving his permission for this to happen.

2 comments:

James H. said...

Interestingly, I had just got a copy of this book for Christmas and was thinking about translating the Java code into Ruby as well as an exercise.

gnupate said...

It's a fun challenge, and I thought it was worthwhile. Maybe a good next step would be to work on translating some of the example code from the refactorings catalog. Translating 'Chapter 15: A Longer Example' (cut from the book, but available as a PDF) would be a fun project too.