soaked and soaped

The last RadRails version 0.7.2 was released 3 months ago and it seems the RadRails-Team members are spending their time on other things. RadRails isn’t feature complete yet and there are still many bugs bugs waiting to be fixed.

And honestly, I don’t like to work with software, which needs some work but isn’t under maintenance/development any more.

So I (again) took a look at other Rails editors/IDEs to try out. After playing around with vim and emacs I decided to give emacs a try.

I just want to highlight two very well written and helpful RadRails tutorials posted on the radrails.org blog:


Rolling with Ruby on Rails
and How To Setup/Configure Eclipse SQL Explorer Plugin

Some days ago I read on a news feed that Java SE 6 is ready. I had a look at the Key Features List. One point was Improved desktop performance and integration. So I wondered if RadRails could be faster then it was with Java SE 5.

I just want to drop a note that RadRails 0.7.2 was released, for the case you missed it.

Check it out!

The RadRails guys set up their own Trac-like ticket system written in Rails: Hedgehog

Features include:

• support for multiple projects
• subversion support

Currently they use it for developing RadRails and the software itself. I’ve heard they plan to release it as open source.

I had a look at it and it looks promising. But there are some things that they have to work on. E.g. currently I’m not even able to create a new ticket, but I think they will fix that soon.

Maybe it will get an lightweight alternative to Trac and Collaboa.

The RadRails team has announced that they will provide automatically generated nightly and integration builds for RadRails.

The nightly builds can be found here: http://www.radrails.org/build/nightly/

Yesterday they released a new integration build for RadRails 0.7.2, which should fix some bugs in the RHTML editor. It can be found here:
http://www.radrails.org/build/integration/2006.12/I061202.1640/

I’m using the integration build from yesterday and it runs very well. Keep up the good job, RadRails guys!

Recently, when I switched from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I also had to set up my development environment again.
This time I decided to use SQLite3 for Rails development on my notebook instead of MySQL.

I used to administer my databases with phpMyAdmin or with the Data Perspective in RadRails. Now my problem was, that the SQLite JDBC driver which RadRails uses sucks and the Data Perspective wont work.

So I looked for a solution to easily manage the SQLite databases from my projects with RadRails.
Here it is:

Install rSQLiteGUI

rSQLiteGUI is a very simple but useful graphical interface to manage SQLite databases written in Ruby and using GTK2.

To install it, just download the latest version from here and extract the archive to a directory. Make sure rsqlitegui.rb is executable.

Configure RadRails to work with rSQLiteGUI

In RadRails you can define File Associations. So associate the *.db files with rSQLiteGUI:

• Open the preferences window with Window → Preferences…
• Go to General → Editors → File Associations
• Click Add… next to the File types list and enter *.db
• Select the *.db entry in the File types list
• Click Add… next to the Associated editors list
• Select External Programs
• Click on Browse and select the rsqlitegui.rb file.

Done! Now you can view or edit a SQLite database just double clicking on it in the Rails navigator.

For the case you missed it: 2 days ago the RadRails team released version 0.7.1 of their Rails IDE.

I just downloaded it. (the “Update RadRails..” function didn’t work in the old 0.7)
There are some new features and a lot of bugfixes.

The most important features (for me)

• better Mongrel support
• Terminal replaced by script/console view

See the full announcement here: http://www.radrails.org/blog/2006/9/9/radrails-0-7-1

Notice that they also relaunched their website. There is a community section now.