I’ve been a java developer for most of my career, and developed and maintained some pretty large code bases.
now that I’ve been developing in rails for a while I’ve left my IDE behind and I want so start looking at the actual rails source. I’ve mainly been using the github interface which is actually quite good but I wondered if there were tips and techniques from more seasoned ruby devs?
What I’m missing mainly is my trusted eclipse features like “find usage” or “goto implementaton”. Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order… please enlighten me 😛
Since you’re an Eclipse user I’d recommend Rubymine. It gives you a lot of the same features and has good integration with rails. It has good support for jumping to implementation/usage, although this is a harder problem in ruby than java. When Rubymine can’t determine which implementation is the correct one, you’re usually given a list of all matching methods.
I personally use Vi and haven’t had trouble navigating rails projects, usually it’s a matter of convention and familiarity that just comes with working on the same project for enough time. I default to using grep or find for usages etc.