Open Source IDE for Ruby and Rails Applications: Aptana RadRails 2
Aptana RadRails 2 is a free, open source and professional integrated development environment (IDE) for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications.
It includes extensive capabilities to build Ruby and Rails applications in addition to support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing.
It comes with many features including support for project navigation, smart code assistance, visual debugging and structure outlining.
It comes as Standalone and Eclipse Plug-in Versions.
I use RadRails for work, and find it to be much more responsive than NetBeans. I will point out that its implementation of breakpoints is fundamentally flawed (since it goes by filename without path, so if you have multiple source files with the same name, you will get phantom breakpoints in every file with the same name as the one you set the original breakpoint in), and the variables view can crash the running app server. However, the server controls integrate well, and the debugger is also quite useful. One other thing to note is that it has a hard time resolving symbol references (function names, etc.) for drill-through clicking in the source code (Ctrl+click on the function name to jump to the implementation). But overall, it’s pretty good.
Earl
In fact, here’s a perfect example that just happened. I’m debugging, I hit a breakpoint, I switch to the Variables tab, I expand the self object, and I get this in my console window:
Exception in DebugThread loop: You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.empty?
This causes the running app server to crash instantly.
Earl