Archive for August, 2007
Need an estimate? Stroke the goat…
Two of my colleagues thought it would be hell funny to come up with a magic eight ball type tool for coming up with project estimates. They’ve called it the Estimate Goat. The site was born out of frustration from too many projects where estimates for effort were poorly made by ill-advised project stakeholders. So if you find that you are pulling numbers out of the air for your projects, then why not give the Estimate Goat a go today.
Web Directions South Conference 2007
Web Directions South looks to be a promising conference for Web development professionals. It will be held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre between 25-29 September, 2007. The program looks like it will have some interesting speakers, and the workshops feature a Ruby on Rails course to be taught by Dr Nic Williams.
NetBeans: Rails IDE for Windows
I have been searching for a decent IDE for Rails development on Windows. I have tried RadRails (now Aptana), IntelliJ, and JEdit. I was never satisfied with either of those editors, even though I think Eclipse and IntelliJ are excellent for Java development. I almost gave up searching for an IDE and instead revert back to using Emacs. But lo and behold I came across NetBeans.
I tried NetBeans for Java development about 7 years ago, and it was so bad then that I avoided it like the plague, until now. The newest version is NetBeans 6, and it is this version that supports Ruby and Rails development through a plugin.
NetBeans provides code completion (with hints and API documentation), source navigation, syntax highlighting, code folds, JRuby integration, SVN integration, and contextual menu items for rake tasks and generators. You can also start the web server and launch a browser to view your running application. These are just some of the features that I have come across today. Which is enough to keep me productive with my Ruby and Rails development.
The IDE itself looks to have had a face lift, the UI is now a lot cleaner and responsive. Also the IDE is not as bloated as it used to be with what appears to be an all new plugin architecture. I only have the base and ruby plugins installed. Who knows I might install the Java plugin as well, and give it a whirl with some Java development. But for now I think NetBeans will remain primarily as my Ruby and Rails IDE on Windows.
