Ruby on Rails Needs a Better Programming Environment

July 07th, 2006

Ok, well, Rails is cool, as you can see in my previous post.

The only issue is, there doesn’t seem to be any decent editors which allow you to program in it quite fluently. I mean there are enough IDEs out there that handle Ruby, but none seem to handle it well - as fluently as anyone would want.

What I mean is, there are no IDEs which handle Ruby the way Eclipse handles Java. Is there anyone out there who has found such a thing?

Too bad TextMate isn’t available on Windows and/or Linux. From what I’ve seen of the screencasts at http://www.rubyonrails.com , Textmate seems to be the editor of choice. That almost tempts me to get a Mac as my Ruby development machine.

To be honest, I’ve been considering that for a bit now. Unfortunately, I don’t want to leave behond the priveleges of my Linux system. I am just too familiar with Linux to just dump it. And I am required to use Windows at work, since much of the software we use here isn’t compatible with Mac or Linux.

Too Bad!

Anyways, I guess I will just keep trying to hack it with SCite and the command line. That seems to be the most efficient path at this point.

*groan*

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4 Comments so far

  1. scottmweaver @ July 7th, 2006

    I’ve read a lot about RoR and actually downloaded the dev package they have available on the site but I have to say– I couldn’t get into *any* decent editing mode. Thus, I just kind of gave up and didn’t try after.

    Would you say it’s worth looking into? I mean, is it really that much better than say.. PHP?

  2. brian @ July 7th, 2006

    I would say it is alot better. Watch the screencasts and presentations at http://rubyonrails.com/screencasts and see for yourself. I mean, there are alot of things it may *not* be suited for, but I think for general web app development it will at least compete strongly with PHP.

    I have done quite a bit of work with PHP and JSP/Tomcat and I really think that Ruby on Rails witApache is the way to go.

  3. scottmweaver @ July 7th, 2006

    Where would be a good place to start? Can you recommend a standard procedure for creating a simple app that will work on my linux server?

  4. brian @ July 7th, 2006

    I will post a few tips soon in a post I’m writing…

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