Saturday, December 15, 2007

NetBeans 6.0 and Rails

I have been looking for a good Rails IDE and think I have found one. I was using TextMate which has lots of great quick templating commands for Rails concepts for migrations, rhtml, and navigating between files and methods. However, I enjoy working with IDEs and tried some Eclipse based versions but felt that they were inadequate. My paying job at the time is mostly Java based and I use IntelliJ which makes my development more productive for that type of development.

I had not looked at NetBeans in some time because most Java developers were using Eclipse and that was fine for me at the time. So when I saw that NetBeans had a Rails related version of their IDE I was willing to give it another look. I can only say that for me this is a very nice IDE that has full functionality around the way I develop with Rails. Here are some of the features I find handy:

  • A simple IDE layout for components that is similar to IntelliJ. There are no unnecessary perspectives that Eclipse users have.
  • Support for auto-completion of methods with rdoc helpers.
  • Debugging capabilites that are simple to use.
  • Integration with version control repositories like Subversion.
  • Tools to manage your Gems and Plugins from the Tools menu
  • Easy navigation between Rails controllers and views as well as opening files via keystrokes.
  • Decent refactoring built in
  • Generators for creating Rails components.
  • Menus to run Rake and Migration scripts
  • Built in functionality to start a Rails console from your project
  • It works great on my Mac and much more than I expected...


  • Just to whet your appetite to get you more excited about this IDE here are a couple of screenshots from how I use this IDE:
    Here is what it looks like when editing files with code completion and quick docs:



    And here is a shot of what debugging looks like in NetBeans:



    If you are working on a Mac make sure you look at this link for setting up the fast debugger gem. You will also need to have XCode installed for compilation.
    I think you will agree that this is the best IDE for Rails at this time.

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