This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Marty Andrews. Original Post: Why IntelliJ IDEA is a great IDE for Ruby on Rails Feed Title: Ramblings of the Wry Tradesman Feed URL: http://www.wrytradesman.com/blog/index.rdf Feed Description: Marty Andrews talks about the day to day issues he faces as an agile coach on large enterprise applications in Australia. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Marty Andrews Latest Posts From Ramblings of the Wry Tradesman

JetBrains have just released the first beta of their IntelliJ IDEA Ruby Plugin. I've been using builds from the source repository for a while, and its my favourite environment for building Ruby on Rails applications. The strange thing is, I don't use it because I think it makes IntelliJ a great Ruby environment. I use it because IntelliJ is already a great environment for building HTML and CSS. When I'm building Rails apps, the framework allows my code to be so lean that I actually find myself spending more time working on the presentation of the system.

IntelliJ has been a great environment for HTML and CSS for years now. Its certainly very familiar to me from my Java web app development experience. The release of this plugin makes it at least an adequate environment for Ruby development. If history is anything to go by, JetBrains may well turn it into something which makes me wish I was forced to write more Ruby code in a Rails app :-)