Recently, Tom Henner emailed me and seeked help with issues with Aptana Radrails. The issue was when a Mongrel based server was started in debug enabled, the following error thrown:

An internal error occurred during: "Starting server"

and error stack in Aptana log file:

Well, we started with inspecting the debugger related gems i.e. ruby-debug, ruby-debug-ide and ruby-debug-base. We then updated Aptana and other associated components. That did not cut it.

Finally, a quick google search revealed a thread on the Aptana forums, that discussed the fact that one of the installed plugins org.kxml2_2.1.5.jar can get corrupted. The corrupted file is 25KB, whereas the good file is 46KB in size. The forum had posted a link to the correct file that could be downloaded from here and copied to the Aptana\plugins folder and it would fix the issue. The only problem was that the link was not working and giving a 502 proxy error. Well, the good thing was that I use Aptana and I did not have the issue Tom was having and so we guessed that I should have the correct file. We gave it a shot and it worked. So much for that bug.

So for the other people with the similar issue, I am sharing the org.kxml2_2.1.5.jar file for download. If you find my post useful, please comment and subscribe to my blog.

I had in a previous post talked about different IDEs for Rails development and covered RadRails, a plug-in for the Aptana editor. Recently, the RadRails plug-in saw a very welcome update which includes new features for Ruby, more support for refactoring and profiling (only in PRO edition) and Rails Shell. See a screencast about Rails Shell.

So RadRails 1.0 can profile Ruby code and show a call graph in a GUI and the profiler is a wrap around the ruby-prof gem. The Refactoring feature includes Rename, Convert Local Variable to field, Encapsulate Field, Extract Method, Extract Constant, Inline Class, Inline Local, Variable, Inline Method, Merge Class Parts (internal to file and external), Move Field, Move Method, Push Down Method, Pull Up Method, Split Local Variable.

I am glad I picked Aptana RadRails as my IDE for my RoR development.

I have used the command-line and notepad when I started in 2002, but soon my addiction to IDEs like Visual Studio, made me crave for an IDE for Rails development. Soon. I somehow never used the SciTE editor that was installed by default with Rails. I soon discovered RadRails and Ruby in Steel for Windows. Now, a slew of other IDEs have cropped up namely, Aptana RadRails, NetBeans, jEdit (alongwith RubyPlugin) and Idea. See comparison at The Nameless One blog.

I have been using RadRails 0.7.2 (the standalone version) for a long time now, but decided to give Aptana RadRails a try due to the integrated debugger support it provides over the standalone version.

Initial Reactions:

1. Install was smooth and easy.

2. Connecting projects to SVN was not intuitive but went without issues. See How-to (coming soon).

3. Creating a dummy project to see everything is OK and ready to go was simple.

4. Importing all my Rails projects into Aptana workspace was easy.

5. Great debugging support with very nice Perspectives views.

Overall Aptana RadRails is a great IDE, although it is heavy and takes time to load.

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