"Ruby is the hottest scripting language out there right now," said Governor, who added he expects Sun to make a similar move to support another popular scripting language, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor).

The NetBeans Ruby Pack enables features like code completion. Integration documentation pop-ups are offered for Ruby API calls. Also included is semantic analysis with highlighting of parameters and unused local variables.

"The key thing is Ruby developers have not been used to getting a lot of the features you've had in the Java world," such as code completion, said Norbye.

NetBeans Ruby capabilities extend to the Web framework as well. "This helps you write Ruby on Rails apps faster," Norbye said.

Ruby support is available for NetBeans 6 Milestone 7 as a download. The upcoming NetBeans 6.0 platform, due in November, will be bundled with Ruby support. To access the Ruby technology, NetBeans users can click and then choose the Q-Build option under Build Type.