How I Built My Code Editor in Ruby by Andy Maleh (Montreal.rb Ruby Talk 2022/07)

Glimmer - Ruby DSL Framework for GUI & More

The code editor was built using Ruby (JRuby), object-oriented design, and various design patterns.

Speaker's background: Bachelor and Master's degrees in Computer Science and Software Engineering; experience at Lexap.

Reasons for building the editor in Ruby: Ruby's strengths as a language (object-oriented, dynamically typed, expressive).

Speaker's extensive programming experience and proficiency in various software development aspects.

Motivation to create a world-class code editor written in Ruby.

Demonstration of Gladiator's features: syntax highlighting, find and replace, file navigation, and scratchpad.

Additional features showcased: file manipulation (delete, create, copy-paste), menu options, split pane functionality, and keyboard shortcuts.

Discussion of basic coding functionality, analytics display, and line jumping.

Addressing audience questions about UI rendering library and cross-OS compatibility.

Software Architecture and Development Process

Gladiator's architecture: GUI app using MVC and MVP patterns, decomposed into software modules.

Software development process: incremental feature development, using Gladiator itself for further development.

The 'Glimmer process': seven guidelines for software development, focusing on small releases and iterative improvements.

Addressing audience questions about external testing and refactoring practices.

Implementation Details: File Tree Navigation

File tree navigation component built using Glimmer DSL for SWT, leveraging the SWT library used in Eclipse IDE.

Use of JRuby to integrate Java libraries with Ruby.

Declarative coding style using Glimmer DSL, similar to HTML structure.

Data binding for efficient tree population.

Use of the composite pattern in the tree structure.

File lookup list component: using Glimmer GUI DSL, data binding, and listeners for user interaction.

Explanation of MVC pattern implementation and bi-directional data binding.

Drag and drop functionality: simplified using Glimmer's features and event handling.

Text editor component: styled text widget, data binding for attributes, and synchronization.

Tabs implementation: using tab folder and tab items, with drag and drop support.

File system monitoring using the FileWatcher gem and multi-threading.

Saving and loading open files using a YAML configuration file.

Future features: file content search, themes, extensions, and improved cross-platform support.

Syntax highlighting implementation using the Rouge library.