Monday, May 14, 2007

FAQ: But don't I need an IDE?

No. A good lightweight text editor is all you'll need to start developing serious applications. I recommend that you start out with a lightweight editor, so that you can first get comfortable with the language (which won't take long). But as you become more comfortable using Ruby and your projects grow in complexity, you may wish to investigate a full-blown Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

When you do go looking for an IDE, you'll now have several to choose from...

Ruby in Steel allows you to develop Ruby in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, while Aptana integrates the former RadRails for developing Ruby on the Eclipse platform. ActiveState's Komodo IDE is the big brother of the Komodo Editor. Borland's CodeGear division (the Delphi people) just announced plans to jump into the Ruby IDE market later this year.

As usual, Google for further details and opinions on this topic.

For more answers to Frequently-Asked Questions, check out posts with the faq tag.

Thanks for stopping by!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If folks are interested, I wrote about my IDE findings

http://www.nearinfinity.com/blogs/page/jclark?entry=finding_a_ruby_ide

David Mullet said...

Good article, Jim!

ckg said...

While not at all lightweight, Eclipse has a ruby context that is very good. My preference is still to use a vi clone for Windows (I like lemmy) and run ruby from command line. However, I am liking Eclipse more each day, especially because of the ease of doing unit testing.