Hello,
I am a person who is completely new to the Ruby on Rails coding language.
A friend and I were going to get our feet wet, but instead now want to jump right in.
What would be the best development environment for Ruby on Rails? I am on a Windows machine and my friend is on a Mac.
I have the Eclipse development environment for Java for which I am also learning. Is there a similar program like that for Ruby on Rails?
Any feedback at all would be great.
Thanks in advance.
I don't think you need an IDE for RoR, but if you really need one, with with IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse. But I find eclipse buggy for rails.
There's also Emacs, Vim, E, and others out there. They all have plenty of rails developers using them, which means plenty of add-ons and extensions. I realize that these aren't IDEs precisely, but with plugins and whatnot they get very close. In any case, RoR uses too much metaprogramming for IDEs to work in anything more than the most basic sense in my experience, so I personally feel that in that regard text editors ought to be considered on pretty much the same playing field anyways.
Text editors over IDEs, such as Vim (with plugins), Textmate, etc.
Since Ruby is dynamically typed, IDE is not helpful to it like that Eclipse to Java programming language. And all files and directories are well structured, so navigating to different files is quite easy. The development web server is very simple to use: no compilation, no deployment, no restart, just refresh your browsers.
In such a situation, pros of IDE are not noticeable, but cons does - slow and clumsy.
I really like how Ruby lets you use the REPL approach. My favorite IDE for Ruby isn't an IDE as such. I use a text editor and the IRB or Rails Console. Playing in the Rails Console is fun and while having fun you get very productive.
If you would prefer to use an IDE, Netbeans is a pretty good free product that runs on both Windows and Mac OS X. The Ruby edition of Netbeans will install everything that you need to get started with Rails apart from a database.
I agree with the other comments, though - the best environment for Ruby on Rails is a good text editor with Ruby and Rails support, and the command-line. Quite a few people put Linux in a virtual machine on their Windows desktop, and do their Rails development in the Linux system.