Software for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

General

You need: Ruby, Rails, and SQL and Rails servers, and a plain text editor (not MSWord!).

It's helpful if your text editor does syntax coloring and lists open files in a sidebar rather than in tabs (Rails uses a lot of files). Unfortunately, I don't know of a freeware text editor that does both.

If you prefer, you can use an IDE such as:

• Eclipse (download the Ruby plugin, RDT, separately).
• NetBeans 6.0 Preview M9, which includes

[[http://jruby.codehaus.org/ | JRuby]]. However, it's unusuably slow on my older Mac.

• RadRails is a Rails-specific IDE.

  (All these IDEs are platform-independent.)

Windows

All you really need is InstantRails.This download contains Ruby, Rails, MySQL, WEBrick, and Mongrel. This is what we have installed in Moore 100B.

Text editors:

• The shareware text editor TextPad puts open files in a sidebar.
• The freeware text editor ConTEXT does syntax coloring.
• We have the freeware text editor jEdit, which does syntax coloring, in Moore 100B.

Macintosh

You already have Ruby installed, but it may be an older version. You can get the latest version at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Locomotive is a fairly good alternative to InstantRails; includes everything except MySQL, which should be installed first.

Text editors:

• The shareware text editor TextMate puts files in a sidebar if you

  open them as a "project," and it does syntax coloring. It's really nice, but you can use it free for only 30 days.

• The freeware text editor TextWrangler handles multiple files well.
• jEdit is free, platform-independent, and does syntax coloring; use its Plugin Manager to get the Ruby plugin.