CodeGear is introducing on Monday developer tools for Ruby on Rails and C++ and also is featuring new technology to merge IDE and command line capabilities.

Referred to as CodeGear's IDE for Ruby on Rails, the product is available for beta testing with general availability planned for the latter half of this year, CodeGear said. It will be touted at the RailsConf 2007 event in Portland, Ore., later this week. Ruby on Rails is a popular open source Web framework.

A Rails-centric development environment is featured for beginners and experts, CodeGear said. The company is seeing a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails from Java shops, said Michael Swindell, vice president of products at CodeGear.

Debuting in the Rails product is a function called Commanders, which features command line and IDE capabilities. Some developers like to work with the command line whereas others prefer an IDE, Swindell noted.

"The Commander merges those two worlds together," providing an integrated tool with the power of IDE tools at the command line and the flexibility of the command line for an IDE developer, Swindell said.

Commander also is expected to be added to the company's Delphi and JBuilder products at some point, Swindell said.

Other capabilities in the Ruby IDE include code completion, refactoring, type browsing, and navigation. Development and deployment modules are featured for Ruby, Rails, and Gems.

In the open source arena, CodeGear is supporting the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit for Ruby with patches and code contributions.

CodeGear's C++Builder 2007 tool provides rapid application development of C++ applications. Featured is support for building applications on the new Windows Vista OS.

Developers can upgrade existing C++ applications to Vista or build new ones that take advantage of Vista capabilities, such as Aero graphical interface technology, CodeGear said. Applications also can be built for Windows 2000 and XP.

Additionally, rich client applications can be built. Developers also can build AJAX-enabled (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web applications.

Other features in C++Builder 2007 include increased ANSI C++ conformance and IDE build performance improvements. UML (Unified Modeling Language) source code visualization also is highlighted.

C++ Builder 2007 ships in June. The enterprise-level version, featuring links to major databases, costs $1,299 for upgrades and $1,999 for new users.

CodeGear currently is the development tools arm of Borland Software.