CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch1 1w29 sa
IDEs for Ruby
Overview
List of Popular IDEs for Ruby
RadRails
History
RadRails was started as an open source project by Kyle Shank, Marc Baumbach, and Matt Kent in September 2005 during their time as developers at IBM at Raleigh, NC. Along with Andy Gianfagna and Ryan Lowe, the project continued through 2006. Based on their idea for a startup, Kyle and Matt working on Persai<insert external link> with RadRails pushed as a side project. In the best interests of the RadRails community, Kyle handed over the project to Aptana who later on March 9, 2007 took over it and renamed it to Aptana RadRails.
Overview
RadRails[1] is a complete open source, web development tool supported by Aptana[2]. RadRails is essentially a Rapid Application Development IDE for the Ruby on Rails[3] framework. It comes bundled with an Integrated Debugger (for a more visual and intuitive debugging experience) and a Built-in Terminal (to run utilities like gem, rake etc.). The IDE can be customized to include custom scripts and commands. Some of the other salient features of RadRails include:
- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Unification
- Apart from Ruby and Rails, it supports development with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and Python. It also provides support for latest versions of popular browsers along with HTML5 and CSS3.
- Deployment Wizard
- Provides support for multiple protocols like FTP, SFTP, FTPS and Capistrano. Enables support for continuous and multiple synchronized setups and integration and deployment to hosting services like Heroku[4].
- Git Integration
- Supports most Github based functions like git source code control, collaborating with team mates to use merge, pull and push to repositories set up at Github or other servers. Git-based deployments are also supported.
Architecture
The RadRails IDE is built on the Eclipse RCP, and includes the RDT and Subclipse plug-in. The RadRails tools are also available as Eclipse +plug-ins. The IDE is built to support cross platform compatibility and comes with a GNU GPL license. The latest stable release is version 3.2.2.[5] At EclipseCon 2006 RadRails won the Community Award for Best Open-Source Eclipse-based tool.[6]