Ruby, Ruby Everywhere

On Windows that is….. I have noticed lately that Ruby and in particular, Ruby on Rails development on Windows has been progressing well. I have been using Ruby on Windows for sometime to learn the language and the Ruby on Rails framework. My development has consisted of using:

• RadRails – a great Rails development environment developed on top of Eclipse
• InstantRails – a complete environment for creating Rails applications. The bundle includes, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Apache and sample applications like Typo the Rails blogging engine.

A couple new Rails development environments I have recently downloaded, installed and now beginning to play with are:

• RideMe (Ruby IDE Minus Eclipse) – is a new project that is creating a Rails IDE that looks like Visual Studio. You guessed it, these guys are Microsoft developers creating a Rails IDE on Windows. They call themselves Softies on Rails. It does require the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Runtime.
• Ruby in Steel – a Visual Studio 2005 add-on that gives the VS.NET developer a Ruby environment native to them. I write C# by day and this environment is nice. It does require VS.NET 2005 to run. The web site says not to use for production environment.

A nice utility I wanted to mention is called RubyScript2exe. I create Ruby applications often times that are utilities and not all of my Windows Servers have Ruby on them, this little utility is really nice. It allows you to write some Ruby code and bundle it up with the proper Ruby runtime so you can run Ruby applications without having Ruby installed on your system. In case you missed it Apple will ship Ruby on Rails in the next release of OSX, 10.5. Technorati Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Apple