What is a Ruble?

Question

What are Rubles and what is their purpose? I am developing using Aptana Studio, when I create a new project it asks if I want to use a template from a Ruble. But I do not know what a Ruble is.

Answer 1

Ruble (a sort of contraction of RUby BundLE) are mostly TextMate bundles (collections of snippets, commands, templates, etc, for various coding languages created for the popular TextMate text editor). While TextMate, itself is a commercial Mac application, the bundles are community contributed and the great number of bundles added to its popularity and then to other editors (e.g. the E editor for Windows) to attempt to replicate their support. Since these require Ruby, they can be a bit more powerful than the Textmate bundles. If you need support for a language not already included as a "bundle" option in Aptana Studio, you can almost certainly download a TextMate bundle and then use the "Convert Textmate Bundle" feature in Aptana (Commands > Bundle Development > Convert TextMate Bundle) to create a new Ruble.

By the way, Aptana stores rubles in a directory called "Aptana Rubles", which you'll find in your user Documents directory (on Mac or Linux) or in your "User" directory (Windows). When you download a Ruble it uses Git to check out to this location, but if you find other Rubles which are not known to Aptana, you can simply add them to this folder to get the same effect.

Note: You will only see the ability to use the Rubles if you are active in an editor provided by Aptana Studio (i.e. if using Eclipse IDE with Aptana Studio plugin, there are non-Aptana editors available where you will be able to see the commands, but not be able to use them). Most of the Aptana-provided editors have the word "Source" in their name (e.g. PHP Source Editor).