Rails IDEs March On
Posted by Mike Gunderloy April 08, 2009 @ 01:09 PM
Many Rails developers are perfectly happy working on their code in a text editor – and there are certainly plenty of excellent text editors out there. But others, particularly those who have come to Rails from another platform, find themselves wanting a full integrated development environment. For the latter group of developers, there’s good news: two major cross-platform Rails IDEs have releases available now.
Aptana’s RadRails (a plugin for their Aptana Studio IDE) has just released version 1.2. This Eclipse-based environment will seem instantly familiar to many users, and version 1.2 has a couple of major advances to boast about. First, it includes a wizard that will aid new users in setting up Ruby, Gems, and Rails; this is likely to be especially useful to those coming to Rails on Windows. Second, it has built-in deployment to Aptana’s Cloud Connect scalable deployment service, giving a pain-free way to get your Rails applications up and running.
Also worth a look is JetBrains’ RubyMine, currently in late beta prior to its commercial release. A purpose-built Rails IDE, it offers a variety of features including rake support, a model diagrammer, built-in web previews, and code quality tools. RubyMine isn’t finished yet, but the current beta version is showing good promise.
Both RadRails and RubyMine have the features you’d expect from an IDE, including flexible code editors, refactoring support, built-in hooks for test running, integrated debugging, and source code integration. RadRails comes in both community and $99 Pro editions, while RubyMine is scheduled to be released at $99. Whether you prefer to work in a text editor or an IDE, the appearance of these applications is yet another sign of the continuing popularity and growth of the Rails ecosystem.
... and don’t forget to mention netbeans, that is the best rails IDE imho! And it is free.
You also have a commercial application from Codegear (previously owned by Borland) which is 3rd Rail: http://www.codegear.com/products/3rdrail
Only one to add, vim
Has anyone done a good comparison review? Any compelling reasons to pick a comercial closed source IDE over Netbeans (which is working fine)?
Netbeans is a great alternative. It’s free, also.
Vim Eye for the Rails Guy: http://blog.dudeblake.com/2009/04/vim-eye-for-rails-guy-cheatsheet.html
Where’s Netbeans on that list? It has all those features and it is free.
Hey,
Netbeans beats Aptana’s code complete features. Why is this IDE not in the review? :)
TF
Just to clarify.. The Community Edition of RadRails is open source/free, and it works on top of Eclipse, which is open source/free too.
Aptana offers a commercial version with some additional features (such as the rails profiler) and more regular updates, but the community edition is good enough.
@Fjan: there was such a comparison in the german “RailsWay” magazine #1. According to this article, Netbeans is the best IDE for developing Rails.
@Fjan: not really a complete comparison, but RubyMine seems the most capable of thu current offerings to me.
All options have a very similar feature set, but RubyMine “feels” better. Code completion is smarter and navigation between all the different parts feels more fluid.
For example: RubyMine offers code completion for methods taking named (hash) arguments; smart context-aware completion for many rails methods (eg: typing validates_presence_of : and pressing the completion key will bring up your model attribute names).
I like NetBeans until the point when you have to write code snippets. For some reason the linux version is broken and makes you stand in you head when you add a new ruby related snippet. The snippet just won’t be available for your code, unless you take your computer and give it a kiss.
Eclipse bases IDEs are just to slow…
Presently I’ve given up on IDE’s and moved on to working with Emacs. Gets the coding done and the key shortcuts help with my wrist problem.
Just my two cents… ;)
+1 for NetBeans (on Windows)
+1 for 3rdRail (CodeGear is now owned by Embarcadero).
I use Emacs, because …
You should look into Emacs for RoR development. The learning curve is a bit steep but it’s worth it.
I’ve posted a video of me debugging a demo Rails app in Emacs here (click the HQ button so you can see what’s going on):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc2XtKLOCTI
... and I’ve started a HOWTO series on Emacs from a RoR developers’ perspective here:
http://www.fluidscape.co.nz/emacs
Definitely Santiago’s Emacs installation:
http://github.com/spastorino/my_emacs_for_rails/tree/master
Netbeans is the best!
I have tried both IDEs (although quickly) and TextMate still rocks my socks. I like TextMate so much I use it for simple word processing in conjunction with coding.
Net Beans all the way
@FJan: I am the author of the article about Rails enabled IDEs in Railsway.de Magazine. I had no chance to have an in depth look at RubyMine in December 2008, so my conclusion was, that NetBeans would be the best at that time. In the second issue I’ve written a review of RubyMine and today I work with RubyMine on two projects and use it in my trainings about JRuby on Rails.
So my opinion is, to give RubyMine a try. It’s definitely worth it.
I started with Aptana one year ago, but it was just crap. Switched over to NetBeans, which is doing really well. If you havn’t tried it, you should do so.
Do you know E? It’s a Windows clone of Textmate, and they just made it pseudo open source: http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/releasing-the-source Full open source would be better, but I still like it. ;)
bollocks!
vim + ‘NERD tree’ is everything you need :)
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658
I love Netbeans and it definitly beats Aptana in Ruby development! Whereas Aptana has a better support for JS/Air development.
It beggars belief you left out NetBeans. Gotta wonder about the credibility of this blog…
Like mentioned before, NetBeans is missing. ATM the best IDE for Ruby/Rails development and pretty good JRuby support
Aptana’s RadRails is good but unfortunately quite unstable on Linux (Ubuntu 64 8.04)
For Windows users there’s a little known text editor called ‘PSpad’ which works wonderfully.
It’s mostly text editing with syntax highlighting, project/folder views and simple macros, but it’s very quick to start (The JAVA based IDEs are notoriously slow to boot) and can be used as a fantastic notepad replacement and is free, although a PayPal donation to the creator (disclosure: I have no relationship with the developer) would be welcome.
Hey folks – I have nothing against NetBeans, PSpad, emacs, vi, or writing your code on clay tablets and scanning it in. In case you missed it, this post is news about a couple of new releases, not an overall review of the state of the Rails IDE world. When NetBeans bumps their version and announces new features, we’ll be happy to give them some virtual ink as well.
^
Clay tablet here!
People really took this blog post out of context. But that’s to be expected when you talk about IDE’s or text editors – if you don’t mention “their” choice of tool, they get defensive :)
I like Notepad++ on windows. Does anyone know if there are add-on for it to use it as a RoR editor?
I have tried Netbeans and Aptana and the winner is TextMate!
I’m using NetBeans and I love it – used it years ago for some java work – it’s a little slow here and there but the code completion is improving and it is very stable.
The rails project support is second-to-none – and the seemless switching of ruby runtimes (cruby/jruby) is really helpful if you choose to deploy to a servlet environment.
Only big problem is the lack of git support (for now). Absolutely none in the IDE (it’s being worked on), and nbgit has a long way to go.
why did you not include Netbeans 6.5 which is a most complete ruby/jruby/rails IDE? It is great and very stable on Linux(ubuntu) Netbeans is free. Do you mind to re-edit this post and include that crucial information?
JetBrains offers a 50% discount coupon for RubyMine 1.0: http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/index.html
Another one is Ruby-in-Steel http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Developer-Overview
it has a visual form designer that generates your erb code