Must have Tools for a Ruby on Rails Developer?

Question

What Tools do all you ruby on rails developers use? Also do you use JQuery, Git, Rspec, IDEs etc?

What should i stay away from i.e RJS, Prototype, scriptaculous, Sinatra?

Any Tips/Tricks/advice greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance ;-)

Answer 1

I suppose it depends on what platform you're working on. In terms of IDE - on Mac I would recommend TextMate and on Windows I would recommend e-TextEditor.

Tools like jQuery and Git will mostly depend on your application.

Answer 2

You need:

• Git and GitX (mac only)

• Textmate on Mac or Aptana on Windows (IDEs) and the zen-coding bundles

• Sequel Pro to manage your database

• A good shell (the default one is good on any unix system, on windows you might want something better)

For libraries, gems, plugins:

• Rspec, cucumber

• jQuery is a must have for me, but prototype is fine in some cases

• paperclip if you start managing files

More generally speaking:

• Firefox, IE6,7,8, Opera, Chrome, Safari...

• Photoshop

• Firebug

Answer 3

For Ruby/Rails code development I use Netbeans. It has great support for Rails + RSpec/Test Unit. Moreover it works the same on Windows and Linux which is a big deal for me.

Take a look at its features.

Answer 4

SCM:

• Git has replaced subversion as the go to revision control scheme of choice, but I still prefer to use Subversion for projects that are unlikely to have involvement from others. Git is definitely the way to go for plugins and gems.

IDE/editor:

• Textmate is the go to editor on Mac. On other platforms I prefer Netbeans to Aptana. Haven't tried it yet, but, RubyMine is supposed to be very good.

Javascript:

• I see JQuery + JQuery-UI vs. Prototype + Script.aculo.us as grounds for a holy war. It all boils down to preference. This blog post details the differences between them as of the start of this year. I learnt Prototype first, and haven't spent enough time with jQuery to form a proper impression.

• I'm actually a fan of RJS. So I'll use it frequently. Why do you think it should be avoided? There are plugins available to allow RJS to generate jQuery.

Database:

• I'll use MySQL for an application, with sqlite3 in test.

Testing:

• I prefer Shoulda to Rspec. Also Cucumber is worth looking into.

Plugins/Gems:

• Rails footnotes or Rack-bug also make debugging the front end a breeze.
• Will Paginate

Full text Search:

Plenty of options here:

• thinking_sphinx/sphinx
• acts_as_ferret/ferret
• xapit/xapian
• acts_as_solr/solr

So far I've only had experience with thinking_sphinx but xapit looks promising.

Others:

• Firefox + Firebug is essential for tracking http requests and working out parameter issues.