Recipe 2.7. Cross-Platform Developing with RadRails

Problem

You want an integrated development environment, or IDE, for developing your Rails applications that is cross-platform, full-featured, and Rails-friendly.

Solution

Download and install RadRails (http://www.radrails.org).

Installing RadRails requires Ruby 1.8.4, Rails 1.1+, and Java 1.4+ to be on your system. Once these prerequisites are met, you simply download, extract, and run the RadRails executable to get started.

Discussion

After reading a few dozen posts from the Rails blogosphere, you may be wondering if there are any IDEs for Rails development other than TextMate. Luckily, for people without Macs (or who just prefer an alternative) there's RadRails.

RadRails is a Rails-centric IDE built on top of the Eclipse project. Eclipse is a platform-independent software framework for delivering what the project calls rich-client applications. Because Eclipse, and therefore RadRails, is Java-based, it's a cross-platform development option for whatever OS you happen to be running.

RadRails includes dozens of features, all designed to ease Rails development. It includes a graphical project drawer, syntax highlighting, built-in Rails generators, a WEBrick server, and more. A built-in browser lets you interact with your applications without leaving the IDE.

Included with RadRails is an Eclipse plug-in called subclipse. Subclipse provides an easy-to-use, graphical frontend to the Subversion source control management system. Subclipse lets you perform common Subversion commands in a right-click (option-click for Macs) menu off of each file or directory in the project drawer.

The database perspective allows you to inspect the structure and contents of your database. You can execute queries against your data from within a Query view.

Figure 2-3 show RadRails displaying the Rails welcome page.

Figure 2-3. A Rails project opened and running in RadRails

See Also

• Section 2.4"

• Section 2.6"