Netbeans 6 - best IDE for Ruby and Rails?
Posted by Saulius Grigaitis
I've tried Netbeans 6 with Ruby support yesterday. I'm impressed. I'm impressed twice:). I used Netbeans for programming tasks at the university few years ago, but Netbeans was just IDE for Java development, I never thought that they achieved so much in Ruby and Rails support nowadays. First of all, read what Infrid writes on his blog lifeonrails.org. There are some videos on netbeans.org too. That's impressive. Is it time to throw out your favorite IDE or editor even if it is textmate? In most cases - Yes.
Unfortunately, there is no Netbeans precompiled binary or port for my favorite operating system FreeBSD, the same situation is with Java Application Server - GlassFish, which is suitable for deploying JRuby on Rails projects. If you do not use Linux, OS X, Solaris or Windows, then building Netbeans and GlassFish from source is probably the only one way to get it working in your box. This way should work for most of Unix derived operating systems, which has JDK 1.5 and other required tools like ANT. The instructions how to built Netbeans from source is available at Netbeans Wiki. Full Netbeans source code checkout and build takes about few hours if your machine and internet downstream are pretty fast, so be patient. The instructions how to build GlassFish ant the JAR archives are available at GlassFish Community. This JAR is suitable if you use FreeBSD. GlassFish is smaller, so the process takes less time than to build Netbeans.
Great! So much new things comes to Ruby and Rails...
