Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Ruby on Rails IDEs: More Free Options

analysis
Jun 27, 20072 mins

The comments to my posting about Ruby on Rails IDEs on Monday have reminded me about other free options for Ruby on Rails development. First, there's NetBeans 6.0. I didn't really think about that when I was writing, because the current version of NetBeans, 5.5.1, doesn't have Ruby support. NetBeans 6.0 is at Milestone 9; the Full version (not the Basic or Standard versions) has Ruby support. NetB

The comments to my posting about Ruby on Rails IDEs on Monday have reminded me about other free options for Ruby on Rails development. First, there’s NetBeans 6.0. I didn’t really think about that when I was writing, because the current version of NetBeans, 5.5.1, doesn’t have Ruby support. NetBeans 6.0 is at Milestone 9; the Full version (not the Basic or Standard versions) has Ruby support.

NetBeans is free and Open Source. I haven’t tried NetBeans 6.0 M9 myself: I’ve been waiting for the release version. I’d love to hear what others think, however.

Second, Paul Colton would like you to know that

“RadRails is now officially called ‘Aptana RadRails’ and it is open source and free and will remain that way. Aptana RadRails also fully supports debugging.”

I have been able to download and install Aptana myself, but when I try to install the Ruby on Rails support I get an exception. I’ll be working through this problem with the Aptana people.

Third, Ruby In Steel has a free Personal Edition available. The differences between the free Personal Edition and the Developer Edition are listed here. The biggest differences in my mind are two features in the Developer Edition: the fast debugger, and the IntelliSense support.

Finally, even though no one has reminded me, I should mention that the Komodo IDE also has a free sibling, Komodo Edit. The differences between Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE are listed here.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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