ShowMeTheMoney-15 - Aptana + Radrails.. Hell Yeah!!!

Honey, I got a new IDE!!

Author-Update-Feb2010: Netbeans with the Ruby bundle is my IDE of choice now.. Haven't seen if Aptana has also progressed since then. Netbeans has auto-complete and feels snappier than Radrails.

I was getting kind of opening the same set of files everytime in SciTe and the tacky way of switching between tabs and so on... Of course it had "sessions".. but I didnt remember to save them at the exact points of time.. All in all not happy. Then I came across Aptana as a free IDE for ROR. With the now inherent apprehension of switching to something new.. I try it on another machine and it turned out pretty well.. Then I went Live on my dev machine. So here's how I went about it

1. First stop http://www.aptana.com/rails. Read all about it
2. Download the community edition from here. Around 90 Megs
3. Next we install it. Now we need the plugin for Rails for all the goodness.
   
• Main Menu > Software Updates > Find and Install... > Search for new features to install.
• Select 'Aptana: RadRails Development Environment' in the list and click Finish
  
4. However the auto-get/update service doesn't want to play with me. It showed that it was unable to reach a certain http location. I copy-pasted that url into the browser and it was reachable. I also found the Aptana page offers on manual RadRails installation
5. So I did that. I think Aptana restarted once. Next we need to open our existing project in this.. After a few minutes of fiddling..
• Main Menu > File > Import...
  
• Select 'Existing Folder as new project' in the 'Others' category and click Next
• Now browse and select our ShowMeTheMoney project folder and click Finish
6. Yodel! Can you feeel the loooovvvveee tooonnaaaaiiigghhhttt ?

I can run my tests with a click of the toolbar button shown above.. and Green bars in the GUI!

We got the project hierarchy on the left, integrated refactoring and automated test support and... I'm speechless with joy (for a few minutes.. before I found something that didnt work.. but hey that's ok. As a developer, I can tolerate that does its basic job well... I found another way to do it in the IDE.) And it does ROCK!!

Aptana is apparently a stripped down version of the Eclipse framework. So Eclipse users should feel at home.. as a Visual Studio user I found myself hunting for keystrokes to switch open editor panes and stuff.. needs some more time at the helm.
But good work.. I pat myself on the back. SciTe has been a trusty steed... but now it has earned its rest at my stable of old tools.