Graham Glass, etc.

My Ruby on Rails Experience, Part 9

This is part 9 of the series; part 8 is here.

I've been using the RadRails integrated development environment for a few months and it's pretty decent. However, it has a few shortcomings that have been affecting my productivity:

• No support for searching across multiple files.
• No integrated debugger.
• The editor sometimes inserts keywords inappropriately. For example, now and again it adds an extra "end" when I insert a method definition, causing a compiler error.
  

Because of this, I decided to hunt down an alternative IDE; I'm happy to pay for one as long as it provides me a productivity boost over the free alternatives. Two candidates surfaced; Komodo by ActiveState, and Arachno by Scripolutions.

After reading a few reviews, I downloaded Komodo and gave it a spin. I was able to import and run my application very easily. However, I was not impressed; here are some of my observations:

• Sluggish performance.
• It was laborious just to create a new file and add it to my project.
• No way to execute an SQL script from within the IDE.
• No way to start up a web server from within the IDE.
• IDE did not understand .rhtml files and always flagged HTML warnings.

After a day with Komodo, I moved back to RadRails and will stick with it unless something clearly better comes along.

Education in the News

My company is going to launch an education-focused blog in a few month's time. In the meantime, I'm going to start posting links to articles that are relevant to education and our forthcoming product.

For example, here's an article that suggests that schools need to get better at gathering and tracking data about their children's education progress, something that our software will do automatically.