Using RadRails

RadRails.Jpg I have been on a frenzy lately trying to find a good development environment for doing Rails development on Windows XP as well as on my Mac. I downloaded and unzipped RadRails to see how well this environment works. RadRails is based on the opensource editor and development system Eclipse. It uses Eclipse as it’s base and adds a Ruby editor called RDT (Ruby Development Tools). This combination sounds like a great combination but I found the experience lack luster. I am able to create controllers, models and scaffolds from the system but didn’t really see the value I was supposed to receive from using it. I am coming from a Visual Studio back ground and tought I might be seeing some VS-ish features such as “Intellisense”, as in VS. Unless it was turned off by default then I must have missed it.  RDT does list auto completion as a feature but I did see it working as I expected. RadRails runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, so it looks like a potentially nice Rails development system.  Has anyone been able to find completion or other features not a default in RadRails? Technorati Tags: , , ,

  • Jon

    Features like Intellisense have been talked about. They’ve only been in developement a grand total of 3 or 4 months — hell, rails itself hasn’t been around much longer. There is some content assist in the templates only at this point.

    It’s much harder to do intellisense like behavior in a dynamic language, but it is possible. Komodo, a commercial IDE, does it with Ruby right now although I haven’t checked it out.

  • Jon

    Features like Intellisense have been talked about. They’ve only been in developement a grand total of 3 or 4 months — hell, rails itself hasn’t been around much longer. There is some content assist in the templates only at this point.
    It’s much harder to do intellisense like behavior in a dynamic language, but it is possible. Komodo, a commercial IDE, does it with Ruby right now although I haven’t checked it out.

  • http://rbazinet.wordpress.com/ Rob Bazinet

    I am sure intellisense type features have been discussed, I would expect it with bigger environments like Visual Studio and Netbeans on the Java side. As languages and frameworks get more complicated it makes using them more difficult.

    I am trying out Komodo right now and it looks really good from the standpoint of intellisense type features. When installing the IDE it goes out to my Ruby installation and builds a database of Ruby language components. I am hoping to find a way to get the Rails framework to be noticed the same way. This would be the closest thing to Visual Studio I have seen.

  • http://rbazinet.wordpress.com/ Rob Bazinet

    I am sure intellisense type features have been discussed, I would expect it with bigger environments like Visual Studio and Netbeans on the Java side. As languages and frameworks get more complicated it makes using them more difficult.
    I am trying out Komodo right now and it looks really good from the standpoint of intellisense type features. When installing the IDE it goes out to my Ruby installation and builds a database of Ruby language components. I am hoping to find a way to get the Rails framework to be noticed the same way. This would be the closest thing to Visual Studio I have seen.