Agile Development with Rails: Initial Thoughts

I've started checking out Rails and with it Ruby.  If you somehow haven't heard of Rails yet you can find info here.  I've run through the basic introductions including Rolling with Ruby on Rails and Ajax on Rails.  Those were enough to impress me and get me interested.  So to dig deeper I picked up Agile Web Development with Rails.  Some inital thoughts on the book in no particular order:

• I like the writing style.
• I like that you run through the creation of an application to get you started.
• I wish the book had an appendix on development tools.

So far I'm impressed with Rails but I find the development tools sorely lacking.  I've spent more time so far trying to get a decent development environment going than I have actually learning the language/framework.  If the book had an appendix on development tools, it would save me a huge amount of time.  Maybe this is just an issue because I'm a ruby newb, but the book claims that it's targeted to both ruby newcommers as well as experts.  Guess I'll just have to keep digging online to see if I can get some sort of decent dev environment set up.
On the off chance someone reading this can help, here what I need in a dev environment.

• Works in Windows (must)
• decent syntax highlighting for .rb and .rhtml files (important)
• code completion for .rb and .rhtml files (nice to have)
• debugger (must)
• project or folder type view of files (nice to have)
• tabbed view for open files (important)

Comments

[Ken Dyck]

I'm not a Ruby guy, so I can't offer any specific suggestions. Have you asked on comp.lang.ruby?

[Collin]

I really hope that next month I have the time to look into Ruby. What are the main advantages supposed to be over other scripting languages like Python? It just seems like so many scripting languages are dying out and becoming full lanauges that compile into binaries like ASP and JSP do. I want to find a language that can be integrated into an application I want to make sort of how Python is used in Zope. I wonder if Ruby could be used somewhat like that.

If you never heard of Zope, this is a blog I posted about it last month.

[Paul Dix]

Ken,
I've searched high and low online and even asked in the rubyonrails irc channel. Most of what I'm seeing is the same. Dev tools for ruby and even more so for rails just aren't that sophisticated... yet. It seems there are a number of efforts under way to remedy the problem. I guess I'll post in comp.lang.ruby to get a better discussion going, but I'll have to wait a little bit until I've gathered more specifics on what I've found so far.

[Paul Dix]

Collin,
I've looked into Python a little bit and this is my first forray into Ruby so I'm not really qualified to espouse one over the other. So far they're both fun to work with. There are some writeups/shootouts here and here.
I've actually heard of Zope. What's funny is that one of the ways I heard of it was through reading your blog post a few weeks ago. I haven't yet had the time to check it out.
If you've been wanting to check out Rails but you're a python guy you may want to look at Django. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet myself but I've heard it compared to Rails.

[Phil]

Paul,

I am a longtime Rubyist so I can address some of the development env issues you're dealing with (though, I mostly use Linux and OSX as my development platform):
Your list followed by my responses:

* Works in Windows (must)

The One-Click Windows Ruby installer (which I would presume you're using)

* decent syntax highlighting for .rb and .rhtml files (important)

The SciTe editor comes with the One-Click Windows ruby installer. It has decent syntax highlighting and things like code folding.

* code completion for .rb and .rhtml files (nice to have)

I don't know of any IDE for Ruby that has this (yet). FreeRIDE may have it someday.

* debugger (must)

There's the commandline Ruby debugger:
ruby -r your_script.rb
Lots of commands for breakpoints, etc.

Also, I see that Komodo now has beta support for Ruby including debugger:
http://activestate.com/Product s/Komodo/beta.plex
...Unfortuneately, it only seems to be for OSX right now (OSX is very popular with Rubyists)

* project or folder type view of files (nice to have)

Could be in Komodo and I believe it's also in FreeRIDE

* tabbed view for open files (important)

Possibly in Komdo and/or FreeRIDE.

...sorry for the ambiguous answers, I use vim on OSX as my development environment. For now you should probably check out the SciTe editor and perhaps look into FreeRIDE as well (still a lot of work to be done on FreeRIDE, so don't expect too much). Also, if you're interested in learning Ruby I would suggest that you pick up a copy of "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" 2nd Ed.

Also, for another Ruby-based Web programming Framework you might want to check out Nitro. It's a bit closer in philosophy to Django.

[Paul Dix]

Phil,
Thanks for all the info. I've checked out FreeRIDE briefly but wasn't too impressed. SciTE was what I first started using but I didn't see any type of folder/project view which was a pain. I've briefly tried UltraEdit and EditPlus but neither of those impressed me that much. I then went to gvim which seems ok, but I'll need to take a little while to learn it before it's that useful. I've also played with ArachnoRuby which is very promising but has a few bugs and shortcommings to overcome before I can commit. I'm also thinking of switching over to linux (my main dev system is configured for dual boot) to check out the tools available there.
It just seems that there's no really easy straight forward soloution. If I decide to do my upcomming project in Ruby I'll probably figure out what dev environment works for me just by working with it long enough

[Marcelo Bello]

It has been a while since you posted this, but I was also looking for a good RoR IDE and had a hard time (I don't buy this "Ruby doesn't need an IDE thing").


I discovered that:


1. The best IDE is OSX only (is called TextMate and is the IDE used on RoR videos at www.rubyonrails.org)


2. It seems that I won't ged rid of Eclipse. No, I am not abandoning RoR and going back to Java, but it seems that Eclipse with RDT + RadRails plugins is the most promising IDE for RoR. JEdit is well worth a try as well, but for now I will stick with Eclipse + RDT + RadRails.