Rails starts to get the IDE treatment

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:01:04 +0100

Mike Pence turned me on to CodeGear 3rdRail which is a Rails IDE based on Eclipse. One of the things about abandoning Java for Ruby back in 2005 was that there were no Ruby IDE's. I'd been using Intellij IDEA which was a pretty good environment for Java development.

What I discovered was that Ruby made my programs shorter and simpler and that, because there were less complex dependencies, my most pressing needs for an IDE evaporated. I was pretty happy using TextMate to write my code.

Then Rails came along.

TextMate handles ruby well enough and the fact that Rails has a single way of organizing projects still means that you can be pretty effective without an IDE. However Rails adds a metric assload of new classes and methods and new dependencies. And debugging Rails apps can be painful.

Since I am getting involved in another serious Rails project I am looking for an edge and 3rdRail does have some impressive tricks up it's sleeve. That said it's based on Eclipse which I don't count as a plus (not the least of which is that it's about as UnMacLike as an app can get) and it's still a little rough around the edges (although I trust the CodeGear guys are sanding furiously).

Today I saw an article by George Cook about NetBeans 6 Beta 1 which seems to have pretty substantial Ruby support.

NetBeans is a powerful and free. You can create Ruby and Rails projects, run Ruby files, configure interpreters (MRI and JRuby), install Gems graphically, run tests, run RSpecs, debug Ruby code, run Rails apps, and so on, all from the IDE.

In my Java days I did try NetBeans once and hated it even more than Eclipse. But times change and what George shows in detail looks pretty useful. It's also only 19mb. Much smaller than the 3rdRail download (which also includes Ruby, Rails, Interbase, and MySQL ... I think they should dump those into separate downloads and have the app download them iff you choose to install them).

Since NetBeans is free I think CodeGear (at $200) are going to fight to demonstrate their value. Things like their dependency views (if NetBeans doesn't have equivalents, I don't know yet) look very useful. 3rdRail really does try to understand the structure of a Rails project. That could, in the long run, be well worth paying for.

At this point I am really not sure where I will be writing my Rails code in 6 months time.

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Rails starts to get the IDE treatment