Rails tool space is heating up
Posted by David September 20, 2007 @ 10:45 PM
There’s a lot of action going on in the Rails IDE space these days. Besides Aptana RadRails, which has been around for a long time, Sun’s got impressive Rails support in the new NetBeans, and just this week CodeGear launched their 3rdRail IDE, which also looks like a great setup.
I’m personally not quite ready to leave TextMate behind, but it’s encouraging to see all these options for dedicated Rails IDEs. It’s not going to be long before they’ll be giving regular text editors a serious run for their money.
NetBeans with the new Ruby pack and integrated Ruby on Rails support is fantastic.
Testing, Debugging and TextMate-like snippets are all available.
“3rd Rail.” Awesome name. Why stop there? They could have a tag line like “electrocute your Rails development!”
Maybe somebody with greater experience than me can make a comparison/evaluation, including Eclipse.
Thanks in advance!
My highly objectective comparison: TextMate is the best!
OK, I’ve not used an IDE with a dynamic language in a few years (WingIDE w/ Python), but being able to set a break point in your IDE, switch to your web browser, enter a URL, watch the request hang, then switch back to the IDE and start stepping through the code is invaluable in learning how your code or the framework are doing things.
Aside from the lovely simplicity of TextMate, the feature I most appreciate is it’s ability to easily peruse code and projects written by other developers. If I’ve just acquired an interesting tarball or svn checkout, it is so nice to be able to do:
‘mate ~/Desktop/InterstingProject-0.1/’
This opens the entire project in TextMate. No muss, no fuss, no “Project Wizard”. Then I hit Command-T and start to filter through the filenames. e.g. Command-T ’.txt’ is a good place to start, as all documentation files are likely to be listed, regardless of how the developers have chosen to strucutre their code.
I’ve just done a large Rails project (> 1 year) using the Ruby in Steel IDE (http://www.sapphiresteel.com/). I’ve looked at several and I think it’s the best out there so far.
It runs on top of MS Visual Studio so if you are a Mac user (like me) you will need to run it under coherence. Don’t get me wrong, I love Textmate, but it just does not do Intellisense or dynamically updating watch windows, which are real productivity booosters.
Just started playing with NetBeans last night. So far it looks pretty good. I had been using Aptana for a couple months, which I liked, but its features just never seemed completely fleshed out. Definitely looking forward to using NetBeans some more. 3rd Rail and Sapphire Steel look nice, but the $$$ is too much. Free is best right now!
Wow, the NetBeans is really impressive. The others are suffering from general Eclipse-ness. But I’m impressed. Good to see the competition warming up.
3rdRail seems to just be Eclipse 3.3 with a bunch of plugins from the Equinox discovery server and Borland branding. Great value for $300, guys!
I have been observing and using Netbeans with Rails since the begging of the project. Before I used RadRails/Aptana and I can promise you Netbeans is great piece of code right now. Tor has done HUGE work. Right now I (personally) think it is the best Ide for Ruby and Ruby On Rails.
So far from it. Did you actually try it or watch the vid? It goes very deep into Rails, farther than Netbeans and much farther than RadRails.
Yes, I downloaded all 300M of it and gave it a spin. I was not impressed.
is the best
Jacek, yes I agree Thor deserves a medal for what he is doing.
Talking about recognition why is this blog so quite about www.railsruble.com ???
oops typo, should be www.railsrumble.com
JetBrains IntelliJ’s Ruby plugin is getting better and better. They have the best Java IDE on the planet (by far) so I’m expecting they will eventually have the best ruby IDE.
Netbeans has the lead for the time being though.
Does Textmate have a debugger now?
Vim is the best. I’m cool too though.
IDE’s are for @#$
@phil JetBrains IntelliJ’s Ruby plugin is getting better and better. They have the best Java IDE on the planet (by far) so I’m expecting they will eventually have the best ruby IDE.
True. I’ll never go back to eclipse. By the way, that n00b Terry Chay won’t shut his profanity filled mouth. http://terrychay.com/blog/article/php-ruby-evil-good.shtml Someone should shut up his crappy blog about PHP killing Rails. Give me a break! Anyone see the growth of Ruby?
Vim FTW! I haven’t found anything that could replace my beloved Vim so far.
I used to be a TextMate devotee, but I’ve recently discovered Netbeans, which rocks! (especially the in-editor debugging).
Check out my blog post on this topic…
http://richtextblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/netbeans-intervenes.html
I just don’t even understand comparing textmate/emacs/vim to an IDE, it’s not even the same ballpark.
That said, I’ve tried textmate, vim, radrails (pre and post aptana), komodo’s thing (can’t even remember it’s name), 3rdrail, and the ruby ide from netbeans, and netbeans destroy’s all of them. It’s intellisense alone could make the decision for me on most of the comparisons.
3rdrail has some nice features too, but i’m not spending $300 when netbeans is free and 95% of the functionality (and some things 3rdrail doesn’t do)
As for debugging, netbeans can’t be beaten. The only issue i have with netbeans is that it’s written in java, but you can’t have everything your way.
Komodo Edit has good support for Rails.
It is a nice middle ground between a text editor and a heavy environment like NetBeans.
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For Windows users there is now an equivilent to TextMate. It’s called E TextEditor and it has TextMate bundles support. It’s got a way to go yet as it’s just in 1.0 release but it’s pretty good. I’ve switched to it from Aptana RadRails as their focus seems to be on features rather than stability. (http://www.e-texteditor.com/)
Aptana RadRails was the best option for me, but recently I changed to Netbeans because it’s a great alternative.
I made a list of 11 IDE alternatives: http://www.l-exp.com/readerp/ruby_on_rails_editors_ide