Ruby on Rails IDE for Windows

Lately, I have been working quite a bit in the Windows environment. Not my favorite, but sometimes we are forced to do certain things we don't necessarily like. Anyways, it's been more than a month since I have been solely developing in the Windows environment and most of my development purely focused on Ruby on Rails. I had found a very good Integrated Development Environment: RadRails.

RadRails is perfect for this kind of development. The IDE definitely helps writing clean code, create projects, import existing projects and work with WebErick and so on. However RadRails is based on Eclipse and a direct implication of this is that it is Java-based. If anyone has had some experience with Java, one thing that the person learns is that it is not the best when it comes to application performance. Although the hardwareI've been developing with was quite recent with all the latest performance options on it, RadRails turned out to be quite slow.

I started looking for a better IDE. One that would give me the features I have gotten used to while working in RadRail but that was also a whole lot lighter on my CPU. I ran into RoRED, developed by Marcus Oblak from Plasmacode.

RoRED is simple, beautiful, very light and downloadable even on a GPRS modem. It comes in the compact size of 817 Kbs, compared to the 65Mbs offered by RadRails. It's got features that are as cool as the ones offered by TextMate on OS X, plus the added benefit of being free.

If you're a Windows user looking for the best editor for your RoR development, I'd suggest you download RoRED and give it a try.

• More information (including screenshots) on Plasmacode, RoRED and Marcus Oblak here: http://www.plasmacode.com.

Cheers!