Comments on: IDE’s For Ruby on Rails

By: Nirav

Nirav — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:54:16 +0000

Use XCode

Check this out:

http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html

By: Anuj Gakhar

Anuj Gakhar — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:55:40 +0000

Good info here guys, thanks a lot.

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:03:09 +0000

I used 3rd Rail and Netbeans.

3rd Rail: This was by far the most promising when Borland created it but what’s killed it is the stuff that is wrapped around the Java to ensure licenses are paid. This breaks the Java and on my Ubuntu 64 bit system means that for me both JBuilder (which I loved using) and 3rd Rail were killed off completely. Which is a huge pity because these two IDEs are absolutely awesome. 3rd Rail in particular could have been the only player in town IMHO.

Netbeans. Well, what can I say? I tried and tried to get 6.5.1 to work properly but, the bottom line, is that Netbeans is a Java development environment with Ruby rammed onto it. It doesn’t do just about everything that you would expect an IDE to do. Effectively you have a not-great text editor with context sensitive code completion that is basic at best, nowhere near, for example, the stellar implementation in JBuilder or 3rd Rail.

Then there are all the problems with trying to run JRuby in it. In short, forget it. Doesn’t work. Creating a project simply doesn’t work. The gems system is broken. In fact, it all is. I have spent weeks upon weeks hunting down obscure errors, misleading output and minimal help online trying to get the most basic of Rails projects created. I succeeded in getting one project shoe horned into existence but only through effectively bypassing everything and anything from the IDE side, hand cranking the creation at the command line and fixing things in vi.

Netbeans does have Rails support, yes. But in version 6.5.1 it is pre-alpha at best with none of the features that you use and IDE to obtain. It’s less than useless and I honestly regret taking all the time to try and get it to run.

Plain Ruby (non-Rails) worked better for me in Netbeans, but then I ran into the fact that debugging in Netbeans simply doesn’t exist. There is a half-hearted attempt at it, but it does nothing useful other than allow you to step through your code. Variable inspection, watch points, etc may as well not exist and so many debugging features just simply don’t work, aren’t available or simply are not implemented.

The best solution for Linux-based Rails programming that I have so far is the good old fashioned vi text editor and google on hand.

By: tomazzi

tomazzi — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:17:27 +0000

Actually, most of the cross-platforms Rails IDE are – no surprise – written in Java. That is why they are performance hogs and don’t look quite compelling (2 best characteristics of Java mind you).

So you should go for a Vim equivalent and a command prompt. On MacOS, that means TextMate and Terminal and if you’re not on MacOS then, well, good luck.

By: makkk

makkk — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:02:16 +0000

I went for VimMate, as i like Vims capability to highlight everything i ever open. With some plugins it gets as functional as an IDE could be including greate and fast code completion and snippets.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:25:44 +0000

To clarify my last comment, I am referring to context sensitive completion that give a list of class attributes after typing the dot after a class name or instance. I know that this is complicated by not having variable types, but it could be done for many scenarios.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:18:51 +0000

It has been almost a year since I tried the IDEs for rails. Coming from a Turbo Pascal, C++ Builder, Delphi, MS Visual Studio background, I really wanted a nice IDE and tried every one that I could find last year; but I didn’t like any of them at that time. They all seemed bloated and needed more time to learn them than I needed to learn Ruby and Rails.

I love TextMate and definitely recommend it. Between in and the Mac terminal, I tend to get things done quickly. The only negative for me is the lack of code completion, but none of the IDEs that I tried had useful code completion, so nothing lost.

By: Ran

Ran — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:35:19 +0000

You could also try SciTE, which seems to handle ruby quite well.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Sun, 24 May 2009 08:27:57 +0000

Have to disagree with a bunch of these. I tried RadRails, NetBeans, and 3rd Rail. They were all memory hogs with so much bloat that I wasted more time trying to make them run than I did writing code. I tried Kate, which was about as close as I could get to a fast, lightweight editor, but it has its drawbacks, too. Finally went to Komodo’s Editor, and its been great. Doesn’t crash, fast, doesn’t get in the way. I may move to their IDE, since I would like to have subversion and other stuff integrated, and I wish it had a terminal pane I could keep open, but I’ve given up on trying to use any Java-based IDE with Rails — none of them work as advertised.
I came from the .net world, so I wasted a lot of time feeling like I was supposed to have an IDE.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:44:15 +0000

Another great IDE was not mentioned here: JetBrains RubyMine: ttp://www.jetbrains.com/ruby

RubyMine 1.0 was just released in the end of April and had a very good marks at the just finished RailsConf.

wbr,
Eugene