Working With Rails

you can use Netbeans 6. Try going over the Installation procedure for your Operating System.

I’ll throw Aptana into the mix as well. Community edition is free.

Netbeans 6 is really nice. Unfortunately it’s rather slow:/
I have used it for about month and switched back to vim (with ‘rails’, ‘closetag’ and ‘surround’ plugins).

this is my first post here, so hello everyone!;)

Hi,

I recently used severeal IDEs. And the two finalists on my list are: NetBeans 6 and IntelliJ IDEA with the RoR plugin.
IDEA ist very fast but the intellisense in NetBeans more comfortable.
If you are a ruby beginner, start with NetBeans and after a while switch over to something like TextMate (this requires you to get a Mac).
IDEA is propably the best IDE for keyboard addicted programmers.

Hope that wa snot too confusing.

-Michael

I feel I must add to this conversation. One of the beauties of Ruby on Rails is the basic lack of need for an IDE. There are plenty of snippets out there and autocompletion bundles for Textmate (my preferred Ruby on Rails “IDE” if you want to call it that) but this is not like .NET or other such languages where you really need an IDE to survive. In fact, I would almost say that an IDE goes against the spirit of Ruby. With a language that was meant to be readable and clear, and IDE then becomes superfluous. You should never have to do such a complicated task that IDE’s tend to do for you. If you are, then you might be doing something wrong and you might want to look at another way of solving the problem. I would strongly encourage any beginner in Ruby and Ruby on Rails to not user IDE’s. They can be crutches and will impede your learning process more than help it. Learn how the language works, what is at the heart of it. Then, create your own library of snippets etc to ease the hassle of repeated tasks. Enjoy the simplicity of Ruby and the elegance of the language. Use textmate, emacs, nano, whatever you want! Also, for those of you not on Mac there are Windows alternatives to Textmate. I believe one package called ‘E’ does the same thing as Textmate, more or less, and also can use the bundles and snippets produced for textmate.

Those are my two cents, I’m not trying to tread on any one here, but that would be my suggestion!

I agree wholeheartedly with Matthew. I started out back in ‘89 on the M$ platform with Visual Basic 1.0 and Visual C++ 1.0. We’ve come a long way since then and Ruby / RoR does not need an “IDE” per se. However, TextMate on Mac, or jEdit for those on the Linux or Windows platforms help with the auto-completion features. I must say though, after 17 years of development using Windows and Linux (more recently), I just switch to Mac this year. I will “NEVER” go back!

You can use ruby from console but it is better and easy to use IDE for development.
For IDE you can use
1> NetBeans:- Download it from http://www.netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html
2>Aptana :- Download it from http://www.rubyinside.com/aptana-ide-open-source-workbench-for-rubyrailsjavascripthtml-488.html

For my choice I would like to do work in Aptana.

I use TextMate on my Mac and gedit on my linux box. I’ve been messing with RubyCocoa in Xcode 3 and it seems to have some sort of intellisense, though, for Ruby, it doesn’t seem to be any more robust than gedit with the right plugins.

Aptana has just released RADRails 1.0 with enhanced code completion, debugger, profiler (pro version) etc.

I have used Netbeans, IDEA, RADRails and couple more but RADRails is quicker, intelligent and easy to use.

Aptana guys have listed a feature comparison between RADRails, Netbeans6 and 3rdRail

- Chetan Mittal

I use NetBeans 6 some at work, as it has several nice features. Frankly, though, the intellisense feature drives me batty, popping up with useless help at inappropriate times. Generally, I develop with vim and I leave the Rails console open for quick method lookups and testing.

I also agree with Matthew Vincent and Chris Blackburn that IDE and Intellisense is kinda spoiling the experience of ROR.

There’s also Emacs + rinari which is a rails mode for Emacs. Emacs is a powerful text editor, cross platform that can do so much more then TextMate. There’s also a peepcode tutorial for emacs to get you going.

Cheers

Try Emacs with Rinari, ecb, flymake, nxhtml, yasnippets and stay tuned to http://blog.wyeworks.com. I’m going to post an article with an awesome set of plugins and an init config file for emacs.

On a Mac I tend to gravitate to TextMate, but on Linux or Windows I use RubyMine. I’m really starting to enjoy the product and I’m even finding myself using it on my Mac now too. Some things Textmate does better, but all in all it’s not bad. It supports GIT and SVN, Cucumber integration, RSpec, etc. Doesn’t hurt to try things and find what works for you.

Disagree with those that say “an IDE is not in the spirit of Ruby”. While I’ve written a good bit of code in text editors, I was an IDea user for years (off and on) with Java. Even after getting well-used to Ruby and Rails using TextMate, I still want to right-click on a method to look it up and really miss code completion that worked as I typed after a short delay vs. having to do key-commands. And as time goes on, I still miss it sorely sometimes. I understand that the dynamic nature of Ruby doesn’t always lend itself to that (because of use of method_missing, etc.), but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating if you expect it to work that way. I’ve also worked with others that have worked with Rails a much longer time and can see it is a problem for them as well; they will use what is available in TextMate, but there is a lot of head scratching and searching that is wasted time, and I know for a fact someone could do something about it and still have a relatively fast and responsive experience. I still think TextMate is the best editor for Ruby though. Nothing beats doing “mate .” in the project directory to open it all up and start working immediately (or similar) and I’ve tried IDea for Ruby/Rails and even Aptana, but it just didn’t click. I don’t have the latest IDea, though.

At various times I have tried using Eclipse, NetBeans, and TextMate, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Now I’m using RubyMine from JetBrains. It’s not free, but it’s the best IDE I’ve ever used for working with Ruby and Rails based applications.

It’s biggest advantage is that it pre-indexes your project, so jumping to method declarations and finding usages of methods is fast. It’s CMS integration tools (it supports Subversion and Git) are top notch. And it has a highly productive testing and debugging interface. That said, it is a resource hog, so you’ll want a beefy machine with lots of RAM in order to use it effectively.

Currently licenses are USD $99, but you can get a 30-day eval license, and they offer free licenses for classroom and open source project use.