[转载]Ruby/Rails IDE 大比拼: Idea, Netbeans, RadRails

I tried to have a look an exhaustive view of the features for all IDEs, I might have missed some and your comments are welcome!
Of course, as those plugins are in heavy development, some features might be not fully working.
Ruby is already a straight forward language but you can still accelerate a bit the developing time by making use of any of those IDEs.
While the most complete IDE in term of features is Eclipse, I don’t find it the best, nor the most intuitive and at the end is not the kind of environment I am looking for. Now maybe that’s an old feeling and experience I have about the Eclipse IDE that it is the addition of many features which doesn’t represent a “whole”. Idea and NetBeans really look like it had been designed by one guy, they are really a monolithic application.
Here comes a quick review of the IDEs, many basic features don’t need to be compared and will be ignored here.

Idea
Idea is quite complete, it has a nice syntax highlighting and interactivity with the coder. Its quick access generators and rake access are better than the others (it’s faster to browse and to find the goal you want to achieve). Its autocompletion features are limited for the moment to keywords and statements, which won’t make you win that much time. Ruby Templates are numerous and quite useful. The interaction with the RDoc is not as well integrated as it is in Java. Finally the Javascript and CSS Editor is better than its competitors. I’m looking forward to testing the 0.2 version which should be promising with new features such as Debugging…

NetBeans
Netbeans owns its competitors in Edition and Navigation, which is after all most of the time you’ll spend in (apart of debugging). The syntax highlighting is very effective and clear. The autocompletion is advanced next to Idea and Eclipse at the cost of Indexing the Ruby and Gems SDK at first run (few minutes). The filtered autocompletion is in progress and depends on the context. Once you use autocompletion a list with all possible functions will appear, and while you choose any of them, you’ll get the associated RDoc, saving you precious time. It seems as if the browsing between class or through hyperlinks were better than its competitors. A debugger should be available with Milestone 8.
What we’ll be missing here are : a more finalized installation configuration and some more live coding templates. A way to start a new project out of existing rails sources was added lately. The rest is growing with robust and promising roots!

Eclipse
Eclipse is the environment with the more features as I said before. Unfortunately, I don’t find them as well realized and finalized as in Idea and NetBeans, and as I wrote above, I feel as if the application is not a monolithic homogeneous software, but the aggregation of n small pieces developed by n developers. And I have to admit that I never liked that much in Java / JEE and got the same feeling now in Ruby / Rails.
Eclipse got some advance with refactoring tools (which I had few problem with) designed by students which comes with a well done documentation and explanation if you are interested. Unfortunately I noticed instability when using Nightly Builds (NGT) of RDT (for instance the quick access generators wouldn’t work anymore while it does with PRD version).
I found the syntax highlighting poorer and interactivity with the coder less present than with Idea or NetBeans.
For the moment, the biggest advantage of Eclipse over its competitors is Debugging ability, but it comes in next releases of both Idea and NetBeans. Now the need of a debugger is not as essential in Ruby as it is in Java.
Eclipse is better than its competitors when it comes to YML edition which the others do not parse yet, and the Rails ToolBar which is a real cool addition that the others should copy. You can browse rails plugin (act_as…) with it.

To draw a conclusion, I would say that if you have a license for Idea, if you are used to Idea, you should keep Idea as Ruby / Rails IDE, you’ll keep all the habits you used to have, the highlight will be the same as in Java (for class field, methods…). Even if it is missing some features from the others, the reactivity and activity of the developer will fill possible gap I am sure. But buying a license just for Ruby / Rails plugin handling is a bad choice!

Indeed my Ruby / Rails editor of choice for the moment is definitely NetBeans as it’s the one my productivity will increase the most with, and it is free. The development team is also really reactive, and the roots of the plugin seem serious and robust. You should notice that by default, it is packaged with JRuby interpreter and embedded Rails. That result in larger time than Idea or NetBeans when using rails generators. You should change those settings in Tools / Options / Miscellaneous / Ruby Application (as it seems to be working) to point your native Ruby interpreter (ie /usr/bin/ruby). That should accelerate each call to ruby (when you use generators for examples) which take much time when calling through JRuby. Unfortunately I didn’t find it myself that much fast, and I was losing the Output with hyperlinks of file created then.