I am a beginner-verging-on-intermediate rails developer that is working hard to improve my skills.
I am a little confused about the state of JRuby, and whether it is a viable alternative to switch to from the MRI.
Currently I run a Mac at home and edit using textedit (MRI for ruby, terminal for rails commands, etc). At work, I use NetBeans on Windows, but don’t do any Ruby work there.
I am seriously considering ditching the Mac for reasons irrelevant to this conversation, but I am worried that once I am on Windows, the support for Ruby will be less-than-optimal (I may be wrong about this).
I really enjoy working with Netbeans at work, and I can see that using JRuby on Windows with Netbeans and allowing JRuby to manage my gems would be a relatively pleasant experience. I like the idea of code completion and a full IDE rather than a text editor (without starting an editor flame war).
My question is, is JRuby going to complicate learning rails? From what I have seen, certain gems aren’t supported on JRuby, or things might be done a little differently in that ecosystem. As a learner, I follow a lot of tutorials from the web and from books and I am worried that things might not work or will be hard to get working on JRuby. Is this scepticism well founded? Or should it be a relatively painless switch? How does it effect deployment onto non-JRuby platforms such as Heroku etc?
I am still weighing up a lot of options including MRI on Windows, MRI or JRuby on OpenSolaris, etc. I think that either way I will be going with Netbeans.
Any comments are appreciated.
Realistically you don’t need code completion for Rails. TextMate is by far the most commonly used editor in the Ruby world, and it’s more than sufficient for everything in Ruby. Ruby doesn’t require anywhere near as much tool support as Java. So I would say that if the editor issue is the only reason you’re opting for JRuby, it’s not a very good reason. Because you’re right, there are lots of gems that don’t work in JRuby because they use a native extension of some kind. That said, the most popular gems tend to work in JRuby. Performance in JRuby still isn’t quite as good as Ruby 1.9, but in a lot of cases it’s comparable to MRI 1.8. Personally, I’d recommend treating JRuby as an advanced Ruby concept. It will run Rails, but yes, you’re going to find that you won’t be able to just follow along with a tutorial, and everything will be ever-so-slightly harder for a beginner. JRuby isn’t a particular daunting piece of technology, but it might be more of a hurdle than you want to overcome as a beginner.
I highly recommend shelling out the Euros for a copy of TextMate anyways, even if you don’t do your development in it primarily. It’s worth every penny and then some. Work in that environment for awhile and see if you really need your IDE. I’m betting you won’t.