I've been wanting to get some experience with Ruby on Rails for some time now after reading about it on a couple blogs for the past 6 months or so. The Odeo and Flagr websites are built with Ruby on Rails, as are the popular applications developed by 37Signals. I'll have to admit, I'm a bit of a computer language junkie. I learned Basic and Pascal in high school, C and assembler in college, went through C++, Tcl, and Python phases, and now I code a fair amount of Perl at work. So adding another language to the mix (i.e. Ruby) can't hurt. I decided to start a pet project at home.

A first step was to see if there was a decent IDE I could use. I stumbled on RadRails as they were releasing version 0.71. RadRails is Eclipse bundled with support for Ruby on Rails. So far so good. I've used it for a couple of nights and it's working out fine. I was looking for an excuse to try out Eclipse as well. I already had Instant Rails on my system, and a simple change to my PATH environment got it working together well with RadRails.

RadRails lets me run the rails generators and unit tests from the IDE. It would be nice to run SQL commands from the IDE, but it doesn't take much to do that outside of the IDE, and who's to know what DB someone is running with Rails.