For a while now I’ve done the majority of my Rails development work on my Mac with TextMate for editing. I really like this setup since it fits pretty well with the “philosophy” behind Rails. It’s also nice because I spend a lot of my working day stuck in a bulky IDE. Don’t get me wrong, VS 2005 has a lot going for it, but at the same time it can leave me feeling disconnected from my code to some degree.

It mostly has to do with perception I think and maybe my background in C++, but for as much props as I often give to high-level languages and fancy new tools that make me more productive at my job, sometimes all that just isn’t as much fun as using something a little more to the metal. Rails isn’t the greatest example for this because honestly, it is one of those “fancy new tools” which can make your life a lot easier. I suppose it’s just the feeling of being unconstrained by a proprietary, monolithic development environment.

All that aside, RadRails (now part of Aptana) pleasantly surprised me the other day when I loaded it up on my system. As development environments go, this one took a solid formula (Eclipse) and built on it, putting in some nice tools specifically for Rails (such as stub generators, WEBrick/Mongrel integration, ri docs, API references, rake tasks, and gem/plug-in managers) that, while unnecessary, work well and bring RadRails the closest I’ve seen to any kind of Rails IDE. Aptana itself is a great tool for web development (including some fancy AJAX helpers now too) which I always keep around, even though I own a license for Dreamweaver 8 (though the new Adobe CS3 - which has an updated version of Dreamweaver - looks pretty fancy, but also too rich for my blood at the moment).

While I’ll be sticking with my Mac based TextMate and Terminal development environment for the foreseeable future, it is nice to have a solid IDE style option as well. Hopefully it will attract some of the developers who wouldn’t give Rails a shot before because it didn’t have a shiny GUI.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Anything and tagged with . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.