Ruby and Rails development is often seen as a command line activity. I started my development activities on 8-bit home micros which even then featured rudimentary IDEs, before advancing to Turbo Pascal on an IBM compatible.
So, when I started Rails development I looked for a suitable IDE. Googling seemed to show that Embarcaderos 3rdRail was the most fully featured environment available, so I bought a licence and settled into development.
3rdRail has it’s issues, it’s slow, it crashes and the auto-completion is painfully annoying. Sometime later I heard about RubyMine from JetBrains. It promised a lot and with Embarcadero seemingly dropping development of 3rdRail I decided to take a serious look when plantality started earning reasonable money.
Fast forward to today. My copy of 3rdRail refused to run, claiming that it’s licence had expired. What? I bought the software outright, surely this was a bug. So I went to Embarcaderos website, dug around and found a copy of the licence to paste back into the software. Still no go. I wrote to their support asking what was happening.
In hte meantime I had work to do, so I downloaded the RubyMine trial figuring I could evaluate it and get some work done while I waited for Embarcadero to sort things out. I haven;t spend long enough wth it go give it a thorough work out, other than to say that it is much, much more responsive and appears to be written by people who care.
And it’s instructive to compare Embarcaderos operation with JetBrains. Emarcaderos website is slow, sometimes painfully so, JetBrains is wonderfully fast. Embarcardero has just a couple of short pages about each product, JetBrains lets me delve into sub-page after sub-page. Embarcadero requires a key just to run the trial, with JetBrains I just download and install. And finally the support.
Embarcadero provides a forum which is frustratingly slow, is almost dead and the closest thing to an official answer is the possible chance of a reponse from a TeamB member – a keen user who helps out in their spare time. JetBrains forum is the exact opposite. It is fast, full of content and the company answer queries themselves, if a knowledgeable user hasn’t got there first. I’ve tried searching for results to a few queries I’ve had and found the answer each time on the first page of search results, if not the first result.
With 3rdRail I always felt that, when I had a problem, I was on my own to sort it out, with RubyMine I feel comfortable that I can easily get a solution to the issue.
Well done JetBrains and I point to you as an effective model for how to run a software company.