Eclipse is my best friend right now, I think I’ve said that before, if I change my mind, don’t be surprised, I’m always looking for ways to make software development easier. I like having all my tools in one place, it makes me more productive; for my RoR adventures I’ve been using Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools, RadRails and Subclipse plug-in.
Eclipse/RDT gives me easy access to my all my unit tests and a nice graphical interface, source control, I never have to leave the IDE and RadRails is the BEST IDE for RoR development, nothing comes close. I wish Eclipse was more responsive, you can never have enough RAM for Eclipse, but I can’t complain too much. It’s been a much better experience than Jedit and FreeRIDE, although, I still pop open Notepad++ and a console window and hack out some Ruby code every couple of days
This sounds like a giant Ruby commercial, but there’s more to it than the hype. Software development has come a long way for me from the ‘old’ days (~2002) when I programmed in C++ with KDevelop, when my tools were always getting in my way. KDevelop wasn’t very user friendly, neither is C++ or make, now I don’t spend as much time wrangling with my tools. Things just feel easier.
I still miss Intellisense.
Related posts:
Eclipse is such a pig though! It’s more bloated than Visual Studio!
Seriously, part of the mantra (if you will) of Ruby is being so much more lightweight than Java. I like the fact that I can write a simple ruby script with Notepad2 or SciTE and save & run… run a lightweight web server and view my changes. It feels so very Anti-Visual Studio and that is attractive to me.
I haven’t done any real Ruby development though, so I’m still on the fence as to which editor I like best.
Ben Scheirman - 21 Dec 06 at 2:11 am
Eclipse is a pig– there’s a standalone version on RadRails based on the Eclipse platform which feels lighter.
I should thank Paul A. for introducing me to RadRails, thanks Paul!
Shey - 21 Dec 06 at 11:07 am