June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
60 pages
1h 15m
English
Content preview from Rails on WindowsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Development Environments for Windows
If you talk to most Rails developers, they'll usually scoff at the idea of an IDE. Many developers do their work using the Mac-only TextMate, VIM, Emacs, JEdit, or another simple text editor.
In this chapter I'm going to cover some of the options available for development environments on Windows. I'll walk you through the steps of creating a simple Rails application with each tool and explain the pros and cons of each program.
RadRails
RadRails (http://www.radrails.net/) became a very popular IDE among newcomers to Rails because it is based on the Eclipse framework that is typically used by Java developers. While RadRails and other Eclipse-based Rails IDEs are extremely useful, some Windows developers might find some important features missing.
Development of RadRails was halted in February of 2007 but has since been picked up by Aptana. RadRails will be integrated with Aptana's suite of web development tools.
Pros:
Free
Open source
Widely recognized as one of the better IDE choices on Windows and Linux
Integrated Subversion support via the SubClipse plug-in
Syntax completion, made even easier by snippets available from http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/11/06/post-halloween-radrails-trick-all-textmate-snippets-available/ (courtesy of Nic Williams)
Cons:
The product is not updated often, as development of Eclipse-based plug-ins is difficult.
Can be a memory hog at times
Eclipse for Rails
In August of 2005, I wrote an article showing how to build your own Rails development ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.