Ruby IDEs
 

What good IDEs are available for Ruby?

Komodo IDE
Pratical Ruby IDE
Mondrian Ruby IDE
you can also find them by going to google and using the following word to search
"ruby :. IDE"

I have personally never used Ruby, but Komodo is an absolutley fantastic IDE, I use it for pretty much everything, I suggest checking out the trial version, Its the one piece of software i didnt mind paying for, Its pretty cheap anyways, i think the personal version is $30 and its compatible with OS X/Linux and windows, and the liscence includes all of them :-D....

Btw, no, im not on commision :D
-kieran
:banana:

is there a point to programming in Ruby? i mean is it a language with specific purposes?

Ruby's a general use programming language, but, like Python, Ruby allows a developer to program in a more abstract fashion than in C, Java or even C#. Because of Ruby's dynamic nature, creating classes and methods that are modified and created at runtime is easy enough to be advantageous to use in day-to-day programming. When I'm programming in Java at work, I frequently find myself coming up with a short solution, then having to unravel it until it fits in with the more limited development environment of the JVM.

In short, Ruby's a more agile environment to develop in. In general, an intelligent programmer can create and modify programs faster in Ruby than would be possible in other, less abstracted languages. Unfortunately, Ruby pays for this in speed. Ruby programs are a lot slower than the equivalent Java or C# program. Whether this slowdown is significant depends on what software you're developing. Ruby's had particular success in the web-application market with Ruby on Rails, because serving web pages doesn't often tax CPUs very much.

Great explanation. :)

I downloaded the latest version of the FreeRide Ruby IDE for Windows.
What a crock of dung! I ran a small console script and no result appears in the output window, just a little flicker. Similarly, running a Tkinter test script gives a little flicker only. When I want to exit this wonder it freezes up.

Has anybody successfully used this thing?

I think I will stick with Python.

use Mondrian Ruby IDE or komodo, they are the best.

Thanks again, I downloaded the Mondrian Ruby IDE (v1.0 beta8) for Windows. It needs fxRuby12 and I had fxRuby14, so after downloading and installing the correct fxRuby version I got it to go. Mondrian is a real gem, even in its early version! Seems to work well!

If you are using Visual Studio 2005, you may like to keep an eye on our IDE, Ruby In Steel. The first public beta has only just been released so it is far from 'feature complete'. It currently has colour coding, code collapsing, an integrated docked console and syntax error location. The next beta will introduce simple debugging. Over the next few months we'll add more powerful debugging, IntelliSense etc. The project is based here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com

best wishes
Huw