gears
within
gears

News comes in today that the RadRails developers are turning the project over to Aptana. RadRails is a plugin for Eclipse that aids Rails project development.

I confess that I’m a wee bit cynical about RadRails. It always seemed to me like the bulk of the work of integrating Ruby into Eclipse came from RDT, the Ruby Development Toolkit, but that the RadRails developers were in the right place at the right time and caught most of the press. The features they did add often didn’t work, or worked inconsistently; I remember a period last year where the RHTML syntax highlighting was completely broken and prevented you from even opening certain files. I’m not sure how long it took them to publish a fix, but it certainly felt like an eternity.

Here’s what RadRails adds, as far as I can tell: * RHTML syntax highlighting * Nice server stop/start interface * Create a new Rails project with File -> New * Awkward UI frontend for Rails generators * Integration of a third-party Regex checker

At least, those are the features that I used. What have I missed?

It’s hard to blame someone for wanting to move on from an unpaid open source position, and they clearly did the right thing by ensuring the project found a new home. It’s also worth noting that marketing can be everything, and the RadRails guys were much better at selling their project than RDT (and I mean that in the best possible way). But RadRails always had huge dependencies on RDT, which has missed its latest release deadline and migrated to yet a third home. Does this mean that Aptana plans to lend a helping hand to the RDT project too? That would be welcome news indeed.

Of course, I use Textmate now, so, you know… whatever.