Thursday, August 11, 2011

Ruby Tutorial: IDEs

Personally I am a fan of NetBeans.  It was the easiest to get working with Ruby and Watir for myself.  It will run on Eclipse, and even Visual Studio, among other programs I am sure.  The most basic way to write scripts is to do so in the console, but that is tedious. 

As for NetBeans, the newest version 7.0.something will not work with Ruby, so be warned!  You have to go download version 6.9.1.  From there go to the Tools menu bar and then to plug-ins, from there you can find Ruby and install it.  Any extra gems that you are interested in using, you will have to install either manually or through the console using the "gem install xxx" and then 'require' it from within your script. 

As for Visual Studio, there is a flavor of the language called 'IronRuby' that is being developed to play nicely with C# and thereby Visual Studio.  I tinkered with it a little bit trying to see if I could get decent database connectivity but was unable to.  I'm not an expert, so I wouldn't call it an impossibility but IronRuby is certainly something to look at if you are interested in that sort of thing. 

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