Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Saturday, September 8, 2007

First steps on Rails

Today I start to make some tests about Ruby/Rails IDEs.

I have some decisive points to choose one.

The most important is: I want some thing that do all (or most of) the configuration for me. I'm a developer, and I like to develop, not dealing with configurations...

I tryed four Rails IDEs today:
- Eclipse (alredy instaled for Java app.)
- Aptana RedRails
- RoRed
- NetBeans (replaced 5.5 by 6.0 with Ruby support)

I think that for each one I will have to create a Rails projet to run a simple program. So...

The firt try was with Eclipse, I installed the Ruby/Rails plugin, but could't achieve a good configuration (Ha, Ha: tell me what I don't already know), and now when I try to Run the Ruby project It Says "Hey your JDK is not there ! But it is ! In fact I have two ! I try both, but I think it don't like my previous configuration. I hope that with Java it still work... (In fact no. Goodbye Java at home)

The second try was with Aptana RedRails. First draw back: it is all like Eclipse to me... I think on first look it will let me open a single ".rb" file ant test it. But was only the first impression. I could't make it work at all. In fact when I try to open an ".rb" file, it starts the SciTE editor ?!?!?!

The third one was the RoRED. Well, I think I miss something here. It only let me to open existing Rails project. Yeah, I have none, so I do nothing with RoRED.

And last but not least, NetBeans 6.0 with Ruby/Rails support.
There are a few negative points: 175 Mb to dowload, some questions during the automatic configuration are not so clear, the debugger and other update screens don't have a percent progress bar, so you never know if it will take a minute 10, 30 or an hour... And most important alert. When you update the debugger to "the newer and faster one" there is a gem's verbose field that you have to interact with, but it is not so clear ! Then I only notice that after 5 minutes of waiting and nothing happens.

Besides that, after the first two or tree reloads and some automatic updates and configurations, every thing works nice !

So Folks by now, that is my choice NetBeans 6.0 check it out !

2 comments:

Tor Norbye said...

Hi there, you don't need the 175 Mb download for Ruby development. You can get a Ruby-only version of NetBeans, around 20mb - see http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/RubyInstallation

Marcos Ricardo said...

Thanks ! will see it !