When we first started developing in Rails, back in early 2006, we all used RadRails, and loved it. However, as the original developers moved on to other things, RadRails stopped improving. Finally we have all switched to Textmate, an editor available only on MacOS X.

With the release of RadRails 1.0, the original Rails IDE comes back onto the scene with a bang. Integrated debugging, svn support, javascript syntax highlighting… this thing has it all. One of the things I missed most about RadRails was the tight SVN integration. What I disliked was having so many panes open that didn’t really help me be more productive, and having to use the mouse to navigate between files. Textmate has really shown me how nice it can be to just have your code filling up the screen. I also love to move between files by filename, not having to touch the mouse, and being able design custom commands for custom key-combinations.

I downloaded the newest RadRails to see if my old beloved IDE could hold its own against my sleek new editor.

The new Aptana version of RadRails is really nice; easy to install and get started with. All the old functionality that I remember is still there, and now it seems visual debugging works as well. However, to me now it seems so slow and over-engineered. After switching to Textmate, I never missed the extra panes, and use the terminal for any non code editing tasks. With the multitude of plugins, services, panels and an entire Java application server powering it, RadRails can’t match the responsiveness of a pure editor like Textmate, even on my Macbook Pro 1.83.

So although I personally don’t feel the need to switch back, I can still heartily recommend RadRails as a development environment for anyone wanting to do Rails development. On Windows, the only strong competitor is NetBeans (which caught up while RadRails was in hiatus). And since it is free, there is no penalty to give it a try. 

Congrats to the current team and to the creators of RadRails!