Editor for Ruby on Rails (and other languages)

I have been toying around with either learning django or Ruby On Rails lately.  I have finally settled on learning Rails.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses (although not many weaknesses to be honest), but the two downsides I found were that django doesn’t have AJAX support included by default, and Ruby On Rails doesn’t have authentication and authorization support included by default.  I was thinking that Python would be a better ‘general purpose language to learn’, but the truth is I want to build web apps more than I want a general purpose language (after looking into Ruby the language, I can argue that it is also a pretty good general purpose language as well).  I found out that I can add authentication and authorization into ruby easier than I can add client side AJAX support into django.  I know that is some pretty weak decision criteria, but that is what I have…plus, I liked the concepts in the Ruby language just a bit more than Python.  The Ruby language had more ‘fun’ factor to me.

Now that I settled on a web framework (and a language), I needed a good editor.  Basically two editors kept coming up in my searches; RadRails and JEdit (the RadRails page isn’t displaying for me in IE, haven’t tried FireFox).  After digging into it some more, it seemed that JEdit was a very popular choice, and you can use it for more than just ROR.  It supports tons of pluggins, including Python in case I later try out django.  I am all for learning an application that I can reuse with other languages and on different platforms.

Since I picked JEdit, I then needed to set it up for ROR development.  I found this post that covers everything you need to do to get setup with intellisense, documentation, console window, etc for efficient ROR development.

I will continue to write about my learning in future posts.