Stepping on the 3rdRail
A third rail, is usually used to power trains, carries hundreds of volts of electricity, resulting in a spectacular electrocution and likely death for anyone who touches it.
Let's see if CodeGear's 3rdRail for Ruby on Rails (RoR) is equally powerful,
but more in a sense of being a deadly great tool for RoR developers.
CodeGear's 3rdRail is based on the Eclipse workbench and thus it's another on Java based RoR IDE. Developers who are used to Eclipse or some other Eclipse workbench based product, should thus feel very familiar and comfortable with this new RoR IDE.
When using 3rdRail, it's obvious that CodeGear put in a lot of their long time Borland experiences, of how to build more productive and interactive to handle development tools. Unlike most other RoR IDE plugins, or editor based solutions, 3rdRail offers to be a more complete RoR IDE, with a built-in deeper underlaying knowledge of the Ruby and Rails language syntax and semantics, which also follows more logical the common RoR framework usage conventions.
Thus developers can use this IDE, beside in the usual UI like fashion by using button bars, menus, context menus and wizard generators etc., also in a more dynamic and flexible manner, via read-eval-print loop (REPL) like interactive shells, which all do support a rich set of command completion and parameter/option completion. So tools like 3rdRail's built-in Project Commander, Ruby- and Rails console, offer another alternative, very powerful and intuitive way, of interacting with the underlayed RoR framework.
Of course there are much more useful features built into 3rdRail, like refactoring, smart code navigation, an embedded Mozilla browser, JavaScript debugging, Document Object Model (DOM) inspection, request monitoring ... and so on. For a full list of features just take a look into CodeGear's 3rdRail Feature Matrix and the 3rdRail Datasheet.
So how does 3rdRail compare to other Java based RoR supporting IDEs, like Netbeans, Aptana Studio, IntelliJ Idea etc.?
Well, in sum up I would say, that 3rdRail clearly raised the bar for Ruby on Rails toolings. Currently it supports Ruby 1.8.6 + Rails 1.2.x runtimes and so far, it's weakest part -as with other RoR IDEs too- seems to be only the lack of a fast and feature rich visual Ruby debugger. But CodeGear is aware of those aspects and AFAIK is working on an upcoming 3rdRail update, which will address those points. So stay tuned for an updated 3rdRail version, which then hopefully supports RoR version 2.x and then might also offer some new Ruby debugging capabilities.
Komodo Edit and Ruby
Recently when I was looking through the internet what IDEs and editors with build in Ruby support are available, I recognized that ActiveState, beside their
commercial multi-language Komodo IDE, also offers a free slightly stripped-down version of their IDE named the Komodo Edit
multi-language editor. So I thought I'll give Komodo Edit a try, in order to see how it might compete against Emacs, Vim or PSPad editors on a Windows box for Ruby programming.
Komodo Edit turned out to be a powerful editor, especially for dynamic languages like Ruby/Rails, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, but also for browser-side (CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XML) and web template languages (RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django). The editor has a project manager, a toolbox, supports syntax coloring, syntax checking, code folding, offers autocompletion and calltips, macros, snippets, Emacs keybindings and a sort of Vi imulation, among a bunch of other goodies. Komodo Edit is also highly customizable via it's build in preferences settings, but additionally also offers to enhance the editor itself by writing own Mozilla like extensions in Javascript or Python, which is a powerful feature for people who want to enhance the editor with their own extension modules. No need to say that Komodo Edit also comes along with an auto-update mechanism, similar or equal to the one found inside Mozilla Firefox, which checks for and automatically installs the latest version of the editor.
For my Ruby tryouts of Komodo Edit I installed some additionally available macros (namely the CheckMate and Textmate-style macros) and some extensions, which can be found all on the ActiveState community website. I've also created a bunch of own Ruby commands and snippets, which do ease the development of Ruby code for my personal needs. In conclusion I can say, that I really like the approach ActiveState has taken with Komodo Edit, it is a nice to use editor, which offers some valuable and powerful features. - Those who might be more after a full blown IDE, one with debugging capabilities and the like, should maybe want to take a look at ActiveState's Komodo IDE instead.
BTW, ActiveState also started an Open Komodo open source development tools project, where interested developers can participate in developing the next generation Komodo code base.
Delphi for PHP
CodeGear came out this year with a new Delphi for PHP Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment, which is based on
the formerly qadram qstudio product. I'am not sure why CodeGear named the product close after Delphi at all, but maybe it's due to the fact that Delphi for PHP looks quite somehow similar to Delphi and is, first of all, also meant to be a RAD product like Delphi, but this time for PHP developers.
Thus it's no surprise, that the Delphi for PHP IDE includes many of the for Delphi developers already familiar IDE parts, like a project manager, the main editor, a data viewer for database connections, a quite good working debugger, a form design view and a tool palette for adding data binding controls to forms. The IDE comes along with VCL, an Open Source Visual Component Library, which is also developed by qadram. Delphi for PHP uses VCL and is generally leaned more towards object oriented PHP 5 programming.
So far I have just played a little bit around and only did minor things during my Delphi for PHP tryouts, but I think it is a promising RAD PHP IDE, which might be generally interesting to be used for new more object oriented PHP projects. Of course there are still things which could be improved, like better documention for the deep nested VCL class hierarchies and the ADODb database abstraction layer, how to perform remote debugging ... and so on.
People who want to give PHP 4 Delphi a try, should make sure to get the latests Delphi for PHP update version from CodeGear, since the first product release has been updated from time to time.
Java IDEs
As time goes by the Java IDE market is changing rapidly too and so many of the former big players in the commercial Java IDE field, nowadays have settled over to plug in their own solutions into one or the other popular open source Java IDEs.
A good example for such a move is probably the way CodeGear (aka Borland) took with JBuilder. They discontinued their own independent JBuilder IDE software base and instead now do use Eclipse as the ground base for their Java IDE products. Other companies did the same before and also plugged their specific solutions inside or on top of one of the popular Eclipse or NetBeans IDE bases.
All in all the Java IDE market today has somehow shrinked closer together and is for sure dominated by the mighty Eclipse and NetBeans open source workbenches, which are mostly taken all-around as bases for other software solution projects. So what's left over and is still slightly popular among Java developers? - Well as far as I see it, there are only a few other non Eclipse or NetBeans based solutions available, as for example IntelliJ IDEA, just in order to name another popular Java based IDE.
Beside what I would usually name as real Java IDEs, there are also still some editor based enhancements available, which together with some plugins or extensions do come somehow close to the term IDE. Some of those by developers also popular solutions are for example the jEdit texteditor, the good old Emacs together with JDEE and Vim with the JDE.