Ok, this was not expected, but it appears that Netbeans is about to present the best Ruby on Rails ide to the market. I have been using Netbeans for about 5 years now, and for the last 2 years I have only set it up for J2ME development. It appears that Netbeans team has been working very hard, since what I saw in Netbeans 6 Milestone 10 is very, very promising

I have been struggling with Aptana for my Rails development, and I can not say I am happy. I am a huge fan of Eclipse, even though I see a lot of people who hate it, but for Rails, Aptana has failed to give me what I expected. When you look at the specs, Aptana seems to have all that you might need, however when it comes to working with it, little problems keep coming up, which bugs me after some time. For example snippets are supposed to make life easier for you, and when you’re constantly typing things like <%= @bla.each…. they surely are useful. Aptana made me crazy about these existing but not working features like code snippets. There are a lot people out there who seems to be happy with it, but for me, it usually did not work as expected

Netbeans 6 on the other hand, looks very promising. It has almost that I can wish for, (fast-debug being a very important one) and it’s going towards a direction in which I can see Jruby, java libraries and Rails together. Now add a decent ide with many nice features to it, and we might have a very interesting setup for enterprise development.

If you are in continuous search for a Rails ide like me, I suggest that you give Netbeans 6 a try.

Ok, it is just one of those things that I can’t understand. Why there is no common, widely used solution that is used to connect mobile devices to web services? I am talking about J2ME, to be specific. For the last two years, I have written three of four J2ME apps that uses web services to connect to some .NET or Java enterprise application. After quite a bit of a search, ksoap 2 seemed like the best option. It has a licence that allows me to use it for whatever I want, and it has some documents (not much) that helps me out.
However, the interesting thing is: there is not development in this front. JSR 172 is the standard by Sun that vendors would probably be following for J2ME implementation, but for some reason I can’t find a usable implementation of it. Yes Sun provides a reference implementation , but due to some security issues it can’t be used in many phones, at least it did not work on four or five different ones I have tried.
Apache had a project named Mirea, but it is apparently dead now. Wingfoot has a soap library that is free, but none of the free options seems quite active. By quite active I mean a community of people who use it and discuss it. For me, no matter how impressive a piece of software technology is; if there is not a user base around it, I’d not consider it as a good choice. What I want to see around a software technology is users, since they are the ones forcing the technology to go forward.
Even though I can still use current frameworks now (ksoap2 or wingfoot soap library) I am not fine with it. Why using web services over j2me did not took of is an interesting question. Unfortunately the answer does not fix my problem. So I did another batch of searches, and REST based approach for web services seemed like a good approach. REST uses current standards but it does not seem to have the the complexity of SOAP based approaches. Soap based web services has come to a point where it can cover quite complex requirements, but like every system power brings complexity, and for small clients, this complexity decreases productivity. In my case, I have the advantage of having control over both sides of the communication, meaning both the web service and J2ME client, so I’ll give REST based approach a try. I’ll be posting the results here.
Oh, and all this is for an experimental project in healthcare. It is built on mostly young technologies like Ruby on Rails and if REST approach works, that’ll be another unusual step for me, since I have been using .NET, JAVA and large scale tools for most of the time. Maybe some agility is really possible after all?

No matter how hard you work on your code, at some point you’ll have to use a debugger. For rails, the most painful part of all the development process is debugging. Well it was up until now, but thanks to ruby-debug and its integration with aptana, I can debug my code just as fast as any other development environment.
Before I used ruby-debug, it was simply not possible to use the debuggers that comes with aptana or komodo ide. They are so slow that you find yourself pulling your hair. I have seen many posts saying that you don’t need a debugger so often when using rails, but I can’t say I agree. I want my debugger!
All I had to do was to type gem install ruby-debug-ide and change a configuration in aptana. Now I have debugging at a speed that does not make me think about suicide.
And to make it work in ubuntu (if you get errors during ruby-debug-ide installation), use : sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev