Late to the Party: Tag radrails

Aptana Studio 1.0 Released!

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Wow it's been quite a while since I last posted. In the meantime I've been working hard on RDT and RadRails at Aptana and the job has been great. I'm very lucky to have found a way to work on the open source projects I love full-time.

In that vein I'd like to announce that we've released the 1.0 of Aptana. This release is important for a number of reasons. First, we think the product is good-to-go for everyone. Second, we're announcing a Pro version of the IDE. This version is for users who want to support the project so we can keep going, or who want the extra features and perks that come with a license: nightly build access, priority support, IE Javascript Debugger, SFTP/FTPS support and all sorts of other goodies. The support, nightly builds, SVN access also apply to the other components of what we're now calling Aptana Studio: RadRails, iPhone, PHP and AIR. So if you want to be on the bleeding edge of RadRails/RDT development you'll probably want to look into getting a license.

Keep in mind that while we do offer a pro version for those who'd like to support us or the extra stuff, we are still shipping the same codebase (minus the commercial features) as an open source project under GPL. And we plan to remain an open-source company with an open source product. Here's hoping that model will work for us!

Aptana backs RDT, hires me

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:41:00 +0000

I'm proud to announce today that Aptana has hired me to work full-time on RDT, RadRails and integrating that work with their existing Aptana IDE which focuses on CSS, HTML and Javascript.

This announcement means that RDT will now have commercial backing (but will remain open-source and free!) and that you should see RDT and RadRails move forward at a much quicker pace than in the past.

This is also great news for RadRails users and Rails developers in general as integrating the two will give you code completion, outlines, help, debugging and much more across the entire stack - from model to controller to the HTML, ruby code, CSS and Javascript that make up your views.

RadRails dying off?

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:02:00 +0000

Kyle Shank of the RadRails team has mentioned that he and Matt are both working on a web startup. Looks like the priority of RadRails is lower for them - after all, RadRails doesn't make money.

It's a shame that this sort of thing happens, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've been working on RDT for nearly 4 years now and I can definitely say that people just don't pay for free things. You can beg for donations, but you shouldn't expect them. Given the amount of time and effort - and the sheer number of downloads - it just doesn't pay the bills to run an open source project that passively solicits donations. I estimate the per-user donations for RDT to be at about 1.4 cents*. And if we take out the one large donor? .00071 cents per user.

That doesn't quite cut it for rent and food, unless of course you get the entire world to use your product.

I wish Kyle and Matt well and hope that others from the community step forward and help lead the project onward.

Update: Looks like RadRails isn't dying off - it's getting new ownership.

* This estimate assumes we count RadRails users as RDT users, because RadRails contains RDT. It also uses just the raw zip downloads from Sourceforge for both projects. There is a large number of users we are not counting here who have downloaded via Eclipse's update site mechanism, and who use RDT from other distributions available.

RadRails 0.2 Released, and RadRails' ancestry

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:22:02 +0000

I'd noticed the launch and subsequent talk of the new Ruby on Rails IDE, RadRails. The idea intrigued me, especially since I'm one of the lead developers on RDT and we'd heard a number of folks who had wanted to spin off their own Rails IDE separately or on top of RDT. The interest has been piqued yet again by today's anouncement of RadRails 0.2.

RadRails is fairly impressive. It's a nice fully self-contained copy of Eclipse with the relevant plugins installed so all you do is unzip and double-click the executable. It has custom loading graphics, Rails project generation and all sorts of neat little helpers. So where did it come from and how'd they get a full Rails IDE up so fast?

So, I took a peek inside the zip and I was slightly irked by one thing. RadRails is built on top of RDT as well as the Subclipse plugin. You wouldn't know that by their webpage, but they did mention us in the about dialog under the help menu. Not for nothing guys, but if you're building on top of RDT and Subclipse (not to mention Eclipse), it'd be nice to share the attribution and love. RDT could always use the support to drum up usage or more developers which in turn would help your own efforts...

OK, personal rant aside, I do see a lot of improvements that they should consider. First, you have these wizards for generating new controllers or models. But they're hidden. You have to right click in the Rails Navigator, select Other... and then open the Rails folder to find these wizards. They should have nice big clickable icons up top on a menubar. Next, If I enter the name AccountsController in the controller wizard, you should be able to recognize that I typed Controller as a suffix and strip it out of the name before running the generator so I don't get accounts_controller_controller.rb generated. Third, try using the latest RDT 0.6.0 - it looks like you're running an old nightly build under the hood there because Rakefile and the Rails scripts are all not recognized as Ruby files and syntax highlighted, which they ought to be with 0.6.0. Fourth, the RI view we have in RDT? It doesn't look or work too well where you guys have moved it to be default. It should be fairly big like the console view in the bottom left, otherwise you can't read anything. Fifth, there should be shortcuts to show the other views RDT has such as the Test::Unit view or the Regexp view. They're still useful when developing a Rails project.