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CodeGear Rolls Ruby Onto 3rdRail


New IDE focuses on framework, not just language

By Alex Handy
September 20, 2007 — 
CodeGear this week released its newest IDE, 3rdRail, that focuses heavily on automating and simplifying the tasks associated with deploying applications on top of the Ruby on Rails framework. While CodeGear already offers Ruby IDEs in various forms, 3rdRail's heavy emphasis on the Rails framework makes it stand out in a field where the language is rarely used alone.

Michael Swindell, vice president of products and strategy at CodeGear, said that Ruby on Rails has reached a tipping point. “Clearly, we've been seeing Ruby on Rails growing in popularity,” said Swindell, who noted that enterprises began taking a good look at it last year. “That's an early indicator of a language and platform that's going to become a standard. But when we look at the tool sets available, there's a clear lack of tools that are focused on specifically building Rails applications.”

Therefore, CodeGear began its 3rdRail effort by examining the Rails workflow. Joe McGlynn, director of product management at CodeGear, said his team found that “the state of the art today for building Rails applications is a command line and a text editor. It turns out to be a very productive way to work. But we thought we could improve on that. We started building features that embodied that mode of working within the IDE. One is the CodeGear Commanders. If you're a new user, you probably don't know all those [command line] commands. We pulled the command line into the IDE and added command completion.”

3rdRail also adds more powerful refactoring tools than other Ruby IDEs offer, McGlynn noted, explaining that it was difficult for the team to build true multifile refactoring capabilities when working with a dynamic language such as Ruby. But in the end, he added, the effort was a success. 3rdRail also includes a dependency checker, and tools to help developers find the methods and tests that are relevant to their work.

With 3rdRail versions due for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, the CodeGear development team found itself in a position to solve another Ruby on Rails problem: installation. Although installing the framework and environment has always been relatively easy under Windows, McGlynn pointed out that Linux and Mac OS X have unique dependencies and installation requirements. But the 3rdRail team managed to find a way to install the necessary files and support infrastructure for Ruby on Rails on each of these platforms. The installer can also load MySQL and CodeGear's own Interbase database, which is available here for the first time on Mac OS X.

3rdRail is available now for US$299 per user per year. The product is expected to be updated quarterly, allowing four updates for each purchased license.


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