Final pieces of the Ruby puzzle
Posted by Ben Rometsch on 13 June 2007
One of the major concerns we had with building our first Ruby on Rails project was finding a decent IDE with a usable debugger. One of the first things developers do when they start working at Solid State is to kneel down and pray at the altar that is Intellij IDEA. It really is that good. Even our front end XHTML developers are converts and fellow followers! Command completion for Java, XHTML, CSS2 and JavaScript mean that our productivity and standards compliance are both given real boosts.
We’d played around with RadRails when evaluating Ruby and while it was good, it wasn’t quite good enough. Crucially it had no working debugger. When you are learning a new language or a new framework, a debugger is really useful for looking at the application during runtime and seeing the internals. When you are learning a new language and a new framework stack, it becomes almost essential. We can’t afford to spend two days tracking down a bug when working on a client project, and having a decent debugger offsets that risk a great deal.
I’d seen that the NetBeans IDE had a Ruby build available a couple of day ago and spend an hour this morning giving it a test drive. I have to say I’m very impressed! It imported my test Rails project in a couple of clicks, and the details on their FAQ about debugging had my up and running in debug mode in minutes. Finally this was what we were looking for. Proper debugging, breakpoints, watches and being able to break in a rhtml page were all working perfectly. Great stuff.
The actual IDE is pretty good too. Simple, well laid out and easy to get up and running, it even has command completion, even if this is a little less useful in Ruby on account of the dynamic nature of the language.
We’re all keen on getting a small greenfield development project through the door now so that we can start using Rails for real.