Loving RoR with NetBeans 6

I've switched to NetBeans 6 for Ruby coding, and I'll never go back to those bogus text editors.

Some time ago, I wrote about IDEs for Ruby. I'm not sure I did a great job pointing out out that for Ruby (like JavaScript and other dynamic languages) some of the basic features we'd like from an IDE (code completion, refactoring) are non-trivial problems. The Sapphire in Steel blog has some great articles on working those problems.

The milestones for NetBeans were promising; the other free contender, the Eclipse bits formerly known as RadRails, are now part of the "Aptana IDE." Aptana is a reasonable tool for JavaScript, but last time I checked, Aptana was in "1.0" and the Ruby support still crashed and failed in interesting ways. The fine print points out that Ruby/Aptana/RadRails isn't 1.0. Bummer.

I'm very excited about this NetBeans release. For a detailed discussion of features, check out Roman Strobl's review (part 1 and part 2). Once the app starts and gets warmed up (which admittedly takes longer than booting the OS on my Windows server box), it does a pretty good job of the hard stuff, like refactoring. And it's rock-solid on the rest, like interactive debugging.

Unfortunately, Rails 2.0 became official at about the same time NetBeans 6 did. And Rails 2 changes a few things, like filenames/extensions on erb templates, that NetBeans doesn't know about. But it's easy to work around those things, and I'm sure an update will be forthcoming.