Ruby on Rails is a Full-Stack Web Framework I started working with in 2007.

Convention over configuration through naming conventions, Ruby on Rails reduces the repetitive writing of configuration tasks. Less code means less potential for bugs.

This is the feature that made me fall in love with this framework, and that, incidently, makes hard to find a full featured IDE specific for Ruby on Rails.

Here we compare TextMate + RailsBundles with Aptana RadRails to choose the best Ruby on Rails IDE for Mac OS X. I’m sorry I couldn’t take NetBeans IDE into account, because unfortunately my good old iBook PPC is simply too slow for it.

Performance

Textmate is by far the faster one, there’s no comparison at all. Everything you do with Textmate doesn’t take more than 1-2 seconds to complete, whereas Aptana Studio takes half a minute sometimes.

Plugins and configurability

In TextMate Bundles are Plugins. Textmate is highly configurable just if you know how (and have time) to work from command line and edit or create bundles by youself, otherwise you just have to understand how commands, macros and snippets provided by RailsBundles work.

On the other hand Aptana RadRails is based on Eclipse, that means it’s a full featured IDE with a world of plugins to support Subversion and Git for instance, and is easily configurable via graphic interface. Unfortunately it inherits from Eclipse itself, and especially from plugins, configuration limitations and bugs.

Auto-complete

TextMate has no auto-complete, and no documentation about Rails: this is a big lack especially if you are new to Ruby on Rails and you don’t know much about existing classes, functions and keywords. I started programming in Ruby on Rails using TextMate and without knowing how bundles work, it was just like using a text editor such as VIM: I used to continuously switch among TextMate, the console for Rake and scripts, and Firefox for documentation. The beauty of auto-complete is that it helps you learn your classes, the libraries you’re using (if any) and the framework you’re working on. After all, TextMate is the missing editor for Mac OS X: it doesn’t aim to be an IDE.

Lack of auto-complete in TextMate has been the main reason that made me switch to Aptana, even if it doesn’t perform very good: sometimes takes more than 5 seconds to show up the list of entries, and up to 5 seconds to make the entry documentation appear.

Rake/Mongrel/Browser integration

RailsBundles allows TextMate to perform some rake tasks, such as migrations, without switching to Darwin. That’s that, unless you want to write your bundles, obviously…

On the other hand, Aptana RadRails provides a nice interface in which you can run scripts, rake tasks and control all your servers: logs are tailed inside the IDE so you can take the outcome under control. Moreover a browser is integrated inside the IDE so that you never need to switch to Firefox or Safari. That’s what an IDE should offer.

Price

TextMate costs about 50€.
AptanaStudio is free.

Have a look at RadRails on Aptana.tv .