Refactoring Support for the Eclipse Ruby Development tools

Refactoring is a very useful technique for software engineers to ensure the healthiness of their code over time. Modern IDEs support the developer by automating common refactoring tasks and thus making it even more useful. Although there are several differ-ent IDEs for Ruby, none of them supports automated refactorings. Nevertheless, in this term project and diploma thesis we implemented some refactorings and code generators for Ruby. To achieve our goal, we extended the functionality of existing projects, mainly JRuby and RDT. JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java. It can generate an abstract syntax tree from Ruby code and thereby allows us to get a lot of information about the source code. Unfortunately, comments were just read over and not represented in the AST, so we had to add this feature. Since modifying the AST without getting back source code does not make much sense, a rewriter has been implemented too. RDT, the Ruby Development Tools, are a set of Eclipse plug-ins to develop Ruby pro-grams. We added our refactoring plug-in to RDT and extended its functionality with refactoring support. We now have several code generation utilities and refactorings: • Convert Local Variable to Field • Encapsulate Fiel