I watched two very interesting screencasts today made by Rouman Strobl, a NetBeans evangelist and the creator of the famous Matisse screencast. Honestly, I was completely blown away by the completeness and care with which Ruby editing support has been implemented in NetBeans. I was less impressed with its Rails tooling, but that's primarily because most of the illustrated functionality has been available on RadRails for over a year now.

The killer issue for me is the Ruby editor Rouman demoed. I have never seen a Ruby editor which is/was able to replicate the features shown in the screencast. Particularly, code completion and inline documentation were big ticket features. Another biggie is the auto-insertion of closing statements (i.e. end, } and closing string markers). It's surprising how much of a difference this makes in one's editing of source code. (I've never used NetBeans Ruby, but I remember how impressed I was when JDT achieved similar functionality back in 3.0) I guess my question would be: is Eclipse getting left behind?

NetBeans isn't the only IDE being pimped out with first-class Ruby editing support. JetBrains recently announced a Ruby development plugin for IntelliJ, and even VisualStudio.NET now supports Ruby (through Ruby in Steel ). All of these editors offer advanced functionality, specifically code completion of varying degrees and auto-insertion of block keywords. RDT maybe have been the only game in town a year ago, but it's now starting to look pretty dated and "less flashy" than some of these more recent upstarts.

I've been using RDT since version 0.6, and believe me I'm very impressed with all the progress they've made, but (being the greedy user that I am) I really want more. Honestly, I use RDT for Ruby development for only two reasons. First, it's integrated into Eclipse. Second, it's a mouse-responsive editor. If it weren't for these two factors, I'd actually use VIM for all of my Ruby development. And when an editor which only supports syntax highlighting out of the box can beat out a full IDE solution, it's a bad sign.

There are two significant things to consider though, before completely disregarding Eclipse RDT as a Ruby development environment. Number one, all of the examples of Ruby support I listed above are backed by major corporations and developed full-time. NetBeans has Sun and Tor Norbye at the helm. JetBrains poured money into the IntelliJ Ruby support, and Ruby on Steel is backed by Microsoft. RDT is an open source project with only one or two developers, working on it in their spare time. You can't really fault them for making slower progress than their corporate competitors.

The second important consideration is that RDT is about to make a major release, it's first in a little over a year. According to rumor (substantiated with RDT Trac roadmaps), RDT 0.9 will have most of these major features. In fact, RDT 0.9 will actually include a set of features not included in any of these competitors (that I am aware of). This magic feature: refactoring support.

So RDT isn't entirely languishing, but it is in danger of being eclipsed (if you pardon the pun. Personally, I'm willing to wait for RDT 0.9 (due out within a month or so) to really pass judgment on "the best RDT IDE" - so to speak. However, I'm sure a lot of you are in a situation where you can't wait for RDT support to be improved. You may be developing a Rails app or even an extensive Ruby application which requires better tooling than what is available currently in Eclipse. In your situation then, I would in fact recommend jumping to Ruby in Steel or IntelliJ Ruby for your tool chain (actually, I'd probably recommend either a nightly of RDT 0.9 or a NetBeans nightly build, just considering cost).

Hopefully, RDT 0.9 will be worth the wait and once again establish itself as the leader in Ruby development tools. I certainly hope so, because otherwise I'll be jumping to NetBeans for my Ruby development, and we all know how much I like that platform!