For those Rails developers using RadRails as your IDE, you might have noticed that, in the last several days, the RadRails site has slipped off of the face of the earth. Due to a very unfortunate run-in with their registrar and DNS provider, the nice folks at RadRails are apparently stuck in DNS purgatory. This little mishap coincided with the announcement of the Aptana IDE / RadRails merger. Due to the site outage, many folks missed out on the announcement all together… so I’ll repeat Aptana and RadRails are merging. The location of the RadRails download on SourceForge has not changed.
Aptana has posted a brief roadmap for the new combined product. This should be exciting new for folks using RadRails. It was apparent that RadRails grew far beyond the initial expectations of its creators and, as Ruby on Rails skyrocketed in popularity, support was going to be an issue. The creators of RadRails did a great job of maintaining and expanding the IDE for a long time. They then made the greatest of sacrifices and, instead of letting their product die on the vine, they merged it with a likeminded product for the greater good of their RadRails users. It would be great if all open source project owners functioned in this fashion. 1 or 2 great products is much better than 9 or 10 mediocre products.
If you haven’t tried out Aptana, I encourage you to give it a look. It’s a great Eclipse-based JavaScript IDE. With planned support for RHTML integration and hopefully more extensive code assist capabilities to come, there is much promise in this merger. Not that it is required, by any means, but a high quality IDE will only serve to further Ruby on Rails case and attract more and more developers from the Java and .NET camps to at least give RoR a look.