September 2007 – Mike Pence on Software

CodeGear has announced their new Rails IDE — 3rdRail — and it is awesome. And I am not just saying that because I am quoted in the press release as the regular-guy foil to Matz and DHH, as cool as that is.

If you have read this blog, you’ve seen me go from speculating about how great it would be if the guys who brought us Delphi turned their attention to Rails, to actually seeing that happen. Mike Swindell, CodeGear’s VP, first leaked details about the product right here, and I am honored to have gone from speculation, to participation in the beta program, to realization of a released product in the space of the last 9 months. Totally fucking awesome.

So, it is here. Go watch the movie and be amazed. Don’t mind the Windows Vista demo platform. Give it the 20 minutes it takes to view it, and you will see that this is not, as DHH says, just another text manipulation platform. This is a living (J)Ruby runtime that provides all sorts of code assistance that will boost your productivity in ways — well, in ways that you may have become used to using Eclipse or Visual Studio in another, highly forgettable life of corporate IT servitude amongst the oppressive neutral shadings of endless cube farms. But I digress…

You might miss your favorite Rails reference for looking up all those pesky methods now that you have auto completion, but I doubt it. Feel free to look away and keep looking things up in http://api.rubyonrails.com if you must. You might miss your menagerie of tools for inspecting CSS and the DOM, for tracking XMLHttpRequests, and for doing the countless other things that Eclipse and its thriving world of plugins can do for you. It can be hard to get used to having everything, you know, right there. But, I think you can hang.

This is only the beginning. It is a great beginning, and worth the $299 introductory price in my book, but it is only the beginning. These guys brought us Delphi, including the VCL — the best component framework ever. They brought us JBuilder, and a lot more. They know their stuff, and when the chips were down and their corporate overlords said, “Fine, go do whatever you want. Choose your own fate,” they said — and I am paraphrasing — “Fuck yeah! We are building the most bitching Rails development environment ever!” And so, they have.

[Update: Discussion of the product is happening at GrabTheRail.com, and more videos (recorded on the Mac) are now up.]