March 09, 2006
I've been using RadRails for Ruby on Rails development at work. It's a Rails IDE built on Eclipse, available as a standalone (which they recommend) or as a plugin. We already use Eclipse for Java development, so it's an easy step for me to make. And it does make a few things easier than, say, JEdit. ActiveState's Komodo now sports Ruby and Rails features, but its project file handling annoyed me so I quickly gave it up. TextMate is definitely my editor of choice on the Mac, but on Windows I'll happily stick with RadRails for Ruby and Rails projects.
They've just posted a screencast that demonstrates RadRails features. It does about what you'd expect with regard to editing: RDT for Ruby editing, and an RHTML editor that, while not perfect (no tag completion yet), gets the job done and has enough syntax highlighting to make my life easier. If all I wanted was a text editor, though, I'd stick with a text editor and avoid the Eclipse overhead. What keeps me with RadRails is the easy stopping and starting of a WEBrick web server, generators, tailing the development log, and the simple database browser. This is all available through a terminal window or other apps, yes, but sometimes it's nice to have everything in one place. The raison d'être of an IDE.
Strangely, this isn't how I work on a Mac, where I feel more at home with small, well-defined apps that each do one thing well. On Windows, though, I'm more at home with an IDE. Odd.
Ah, who am I kidding. I ought to just cave and start using Emacs.
One more nicety: the developers podcast their releases, discussing what's new in the release and what's coming up. I enjoy these. They're easier to digest than just scanning through a changelog.
