From: Max Muermann <ruby@...>
Date: 2006-09-08T12:38:07+09:00
Subject: Re: what is the best non-rails web/ruby development environment for windows?

On 9/8/06, Edward <edward@tanguay.info> wrote:
> So I want to develop ruby sites locally like I do PHP5 sites.
> For PHP I use locally Apache to view and ZendPHPEclipse as my editor.
>
> How do most of your develop non-rails ruby webs locally?

I think most people user Rails for Ruby web development. While using
Ruby without Rails to develope web apps is certainly possible, I would
not recommend it. Ruby is not like PHP in that respect - PHP was
originally designed as a perl preprocessor. Ruby is a very
comprehensive general-purpose programming language.

The RDT plugin for eclipse is pretty good. There's also RadRails,
which build on RDT and adds Railsy functionality.

> (I'll get into rails later, I want to get the basics of Ruby down
> first.)

That's certainly a good idea, but web development is probably not the
best way to do that.

> Is debugging possible?

Yes. The debugger that ships with Ruby is slow, but there is the
ruby-debug gem, which speeds things up. It's a text-based debugger, at
the moment there are AFAIK no good free graphical debuggers available.

That said, you don't really need a graphical debugger for Ruby. I was
originally under the impression that I could not live without a
debugger, but after getting to grips with the language I have found
that it's just not necessary.

Cheers,
Max