Archive for the ‘radrails’ tag
Ruby on Rails IDE
I’ve been trying to get back into web development as a hobby; there are many reasons for this, but maybe the most relevant at the moment is that it has the potential to make my actual job easier. If I can develop a website as an online tool, maybe best described as a content management system on steroids and tailored to my needs in the lab, I can spend more time planning and performing experiments, and less time actually running the lab by doing it more efficiently.
Recently, I’ve been using puTTY, WinSCP, and a text editor to build this project in Ruby on Rails. The problem is, I need a lot of real estate on my screen to be able to do this effectively, and I wasn’t able to get WinSCP to open all of my script files in the same text editor window. Combine this with the fact that I had to “touch” every file from the command prompt using puTTY after making changes in the text editor, and saving the modified file to the site with WinSCP — it was really just the least efficient process for designing and building a system to make my life more efficient.
Anyway, a couple years ago, I had stumbled upon RadRails, which was then rolled into the Aptana IDE. Looked good. It had syntax highlighting, which was a big plus. However, SFTP support for remotely working on a RoR project was, at the time, only supported in the paid, “Pro” version of the Aptana Studio suite.
Fast forward to this afternoon, when I re-discovered the Aptana Studio and RadRails, and then found out that the “Pro” version had been scrapped, and now SFTP is available for free!
I’m playing around with it now, but I’m happy so far.