As you might expect, the Rails IDE market is continuing to evolve quickly. RadRails, which I reviewed last August, has been taken over by Aptana. What's Aptana? It's Paul Colton's new company. Paul was the founder of Live Software, and the creator of JRun. Aptana's major product, still in beta, is the Aptana IDE:

"The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code."

RadRails has become Aptana IDE + Rails. To install the current RadRails, you download and install Aptana, then add the Rails development feature from within Aptana. You can also download and install the Aptana and Rails plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2 or later.

Meanwhile, Ruby in Steel, the Ruby and Rails add-in for Visual Studio 2005, is up to version 1.1. This is a minor release, which includes the thread-safe debugger. I'm looking forward to the 1.2 release, planned for the end of the summer, which will include a Visual Web Page Designer for Rails. As I mentioned when I reviewed Ruby in Steel 1.0 in February, the product has fast debugging and great IntelliSense support.

Finally, ActiveState Komodo is up to version 4.1.1. Version 4.1 added Ruby on Rails support to the many other dynamic languages supported by Komodo. (I reviewed a beta of Komodo 4.0 in January.) ActiveState claims that it now has "the most advanced Ruby and Rails support in any IDE," and claims that its "lightning-fast Ruby debugging" is "now 60 times faster!"

While this may sound just a little like hype, I can say that Komodo really is very good. Have I compared the Komodo Ruby debugger with the "Cylon" debugger in Ruby in Steel? No, I haven't. At least not yet.

Stay tuned. Meanwhile, Komodo and Ruby in Steel are both available for timed free trials, and the Aptana IDE + Rails, which is in beta, is still free.

Posted by Martin Heller on June 25, 2007 07:02 AM