Netbeans 6: A Rails IDE? Part 1
So I downloaded the M9 pre-release of NetBeans 6.0 to preview for Ruby/Rails development. WAIT!
NetBeans? Ruby? I haven’t used NetBeans forever. I remember using some 4.x version for J2EE stuff years back but it was a giant and slow hairball. So I switched to Eclipse like most Java developers, then upgraded to IntelliJ for a few extra bucks and never looked back. So my initial response at the thought of using NetBeans for Rails development was one of thoughts of waiting, sludgy response times and buggy IDE responsiveness. Being greeted with a 166MB download (get the “Full” version) didn’t help to assuage my fears of history repeating itself. After downloading, extracting, installing, and then launching for the first time (10-15 minutes later) it came up and I immediately went to create a new Rails project. The process was quite painless and simple:
I would like some Rails please! Let’s build “depot”.
OK, fine, put it there, whatever
Hmm, it suggests that my rails may be out of date, let me go to a command-line and…oh wait, I’ll just press the button…voila!
Thanks, I was just thinking the other day that I needed that ActiveRecord-JDBC bridge (?). Actually, this is required if you plan to use Rails on JRuby, and if you’re using NetBeans you’re going to be encouraged to use JRuby if not forced (I’m not sure if it’s going to use my native Ruby runtime or JRuby, assuming it got installed).
OK, we’re up and running! Nice color coding, collapsible sections, some extraneous comments and some session management code thrown in I’m not use to Rails putting in there but NetBeans has done it for me.
And all of this only took up 125+MB of RAM!
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll spend some time actually developing with this and get back to you.
