Bundles of joy

So why do the Rails core developers swear by TextMate on the Mac? Simple: Early on, they built "bundle" (essentially macro) extensions for TextMate as tooling for Ruby and Rails programming.

Bundles give you incredible power, at the expense of needing to memorize keyboard shortcuts for efficiency. The bundle approach to automation makes eminent sense for a developer who lives in one code editor all day. On Windows, the bundle approach can be found in the TextMate-inspired E Text Editor and InText; both include a Ruby and a Rails bundle.

Why does the Rails team suggest RadRails for everyone else? Basically, it's an integrated GUI development environment for Rails, and it runs wherever Eclipse and Java run. Also, Aptana RadRails Community Edition is free.

Several other products follow the RadRails integration approach to Rails development: 3rdRail, Komodo, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Ruby in Steel. They all play variations on the theme, but if you know one, you'll that find that the others look familiar.

You don't have to restrict yourself to one tool, either. You can mix and match tools for a complete set of functionality. For example, on the Mac, you might want to mix TextMate, which gives you power editing via its Rails bundle, with either NetBeans or RadRails, both of which are free IDEs that have debuggers.

In this review suite, I've covered the Rails IDEs and the editors with Rails bundles.

SapphireSteel Ruby in Steel Developer Edition 1.2 and Text Edition 1.1.5

In my brief review of Ruby in Steel 1.0 from early 2007, I said, "Any serious professional Ruby developer who has a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional or above should at least try out Ruby in Steel Developer. If you're like me, the asking price will seem cheap for the combination of the fast debugging and the great IntelliSense support."

The Ruby in Steel product is now up to Version 1.2, which is one of the critical milestones on its road map, as it introduces Visual Rails Workbench, a Web page designer for Rails that supports Embedded Ruby and templates. That's a significant accomplishment. At this point, the product has most of the Rails integration features that I missed in 1.0, plus some bonus features that I didn't know I'd want, such as a fast JRuby debugger. (See the full feature list for both the Developer and Text Editions.)

The Visual Rails Workbench, the fast debugging, and the great IntelliSense support are the three core features that differentiate Ruby in Steel 1.2 Developer from the Text Edition. The performance hit from debugging with Cylon is barely noticeable, which is not the case with the standard Ruby debugger. There are also mind-blowing dynamic debugging scenarios that work in the Cylon debugger.

Right now, the Visual Rails Workbench can be a little funky when it comes to synchronizing an overall page design with its components, but SapphireSteel assures me that Version 1.3 will fix that issue. Later in the development cycle, the IntelliSense support will be extended to database code and user-selectable libraries, and the Visual Rails Workbench will be extended to handle RXML and RJS. You'll note that there's nothing resembling the Ruby in Steel Visual Rails Workbench in any of the other products I reviewed.