What is the general feelings on the best free Ruby IDE
thanks
I have never used NetBeans but I do use Aptana and every once in a while
it just freaks out and does some strange stuff. It’s free but I’m almost
to the point that I might start looking for something better or might
actually (gulp) pay for something. There’s my two cents.
to the point that I might start looking for something better or might
actually (gulp) pay for something. There’s my two cents.
I used aptana a while back, and some of my colleagues were using it
recently and it was pretty rocky. It’s not that it basically didn’t
work, and some things are very nice (eg the subversion integration),
but every now and again it would decide to ‘rebuild the workspace’
for 2 minute, or you’d double click on a file to edit it and it would
just hang for 10 seconds. It doesn’t suit everyone, but personally I
love textmate.
I’ve been using NetBeans for about 6 months and have generally been
happy with it, but it is at an awkward point in its evolution. The
latest released version, 6.0.1, has a number of serious bugs regarding
how it supports ruby gems (especially problematic on OS X) and perhaps
as a side effect of this it tries to use Rails 1 scaffolds even in a
Rails 2 app, which makes a mess. If you’re not on a Mac, this might
not affect you.
It looks like 6.1 will be a lot better, but the current milestone
build has a number of new bugs that make it problematic for me,
including frequent crashes. I tried a daily build this weekend and it
failed on me within minutes.
So while I like NetBeans, I’d be careful about starting with it until
6.1 is formally released, especially if you are on a Mac.
One thing I’ve learned while reading their mailing lists – the
NetBeans developers, for the most part, don’t use Macs, and don’t
develop Rails apps, which explains a lot of the issues this IDE has.
Personally, I’m thinking of finally going to TextMate, which is what
my colleagues have been telling me to do for some time…
It looks like 6.1 will be a lot better, but the current milestone
build has a number of new bugs that make it problematic for me,
including frequent crashes. I tried a daily build this weekend and it
failed on me within minutes.
Yes, lately the daily builds are worse in my experience, currently I
cannot even create a project from existing sources, even if I remove
any auxiliar directories in the system to start afresh.
This is why we switched Aptana=>NetBeans. Eclipse+Aptana+Rails pack
is a memory hog, very slow to start up, and several features (e.g.,
plugins) either don’t work or only work intermittently. While I don’t
love everything about NetBeans (they need to provide a way to pass
args to rake tasks for one) everything they do works all the time and
it’s much more resource friendly.