Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Just started with Ruby on Rails ( Rails 3) and I'm trying to figure out the best I.D.E. Here's what I've found so far:
Eclipse / DLTK - while researching this on the web I came across a number of broken links which was a bad sign and when I did get it installed I wasn't able to debug using it. Ater some more web searches I came across a few posts that said basically the Ruby plug-in had run out of steam and was not being pursued.
JetBrains/RubyMine - this installed and works, so far the *looks* like the best bet. The instant database diagramming looks really cool, do other I.D.E.s support this?
Ecliplse/Aptana - just got this installed, Will try debugging with it soon.
Does anyone have recommendations for their favorite I.D.E.? I don't need anythgin too fancy, as long as I can set a breakpoint and view variables and the call stack I'm happy. And it helps if its a free product.'
Tags:
Kevin, What have you found out so far with Eclipse/Aptana and JetBrains/RubyMine? Have you experimented with any other IDE's?
With Eclipse/Aptana I *think* I got installed, but the online references that showed how to start a debugging session accessed menu options that were not present so I was unable to use it. So far RubyMine looks the best, it also checks the syntax of of .html.erb ( Embedded RuBy ) files and generates a diagram of your DB tables, highlighting any relationships that look hinky. Worth noting RubyMine costs money, while the others I've looked at are open source and frankly I think the developers for the free plugins ran out of steam. The profit motive at work.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Docker is positioning its Cagent runtime as a way to bring deterministic testing back to AI agents, addressing a growing problem for teams building production agentic systems.
By Matt Foster
This week's Java roundup for January 12th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of WildFly 39; point releases of JobRunr and Gradle; maintenance releases of Spring Framework and Micronaut; milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Micrometer Tracing; and a beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.1.
By Michael Redlich
A growing body of recent research and industry commentary suggests that a shift in how organisations approach site reliability engineering is underway. Rather than handing the pager to a machine, teams are designing multi-agent AI systems that work alongside on-call engineers, narrowing the search space and automating the tedious steps while leaving judgment calls to humans.
By Matt Saunders
Hugging Face has released FineTranslations, a large-scale multilingual dataset containing more than 1 trillion tokens of parallel text across English and 500+ languages. The dataset was created by translating non-English content from the FineWeb2 corpus into English using Gemma3 27B, with the full data generation pipeline designed to be reproducible and publicly documented.
By Robert Krzaczyński
The latest Android Studio Otter feature drop introduces several new features that make it easier for developers to integrate AI-powered tools in their workflows, including the ability to set which LLM to use, enhanced agent mode through device interaction, support for natural language testing, and more.
By Sergio De Simone
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by