RadRails and Aptana

RadRails, the Eclipse plugin for Rails development, has been handed over to Aptana to continue in its development.

These were Kyle’s words (taken from Google’s cache) before radrails.org went into oblivion:

by Kyle – 03/08/2007 09:48 PM

Earlier this week I wrote about the challenges facing RadRails. I chose to come out and face our problems head on rather than hide from the obvious. Matt, Marc and I originally developed RadRails just for our own use; we wanted a Rails IDE. Who knew that so many people would show up after our incredibly weak 0.1 release. We were compelled to meet the abundant demand and set off on a tireless mission to bring a free Rails IDE to the masses.

Since that time we’ve traveled the world, spoken at 6 conferences in 4 countries promoting a different kind of web development and approach to tooling. We’ve set a trend for Rails specific tooling that can now be seen in other IDEs such as Netbeans and IntelliJ. In many ways we’ve accomplished what we initially set out to do and 18 months later there is not just one Rails IDE, but close to a dozen free solutions.

Yesterday at EclipseCon I announced that Aptana would be taking over the RadRails project and integrating it into their existing suites of editors, debugging tools and community features. Rails tooling on Eclipse needs a full-time effort and Aptana has the team and resources to do just that.

The decision to transition RadRails to another group hasn’t been easy. We have poured ourselves into this project and letting it go is tough. After meeting with Aptana in person it became clear that they are really committed to their product and open source community. Paul and his team have the ambition and vision to take Rails and their Web 2.0 tooling to the next level. We will be working closely with Aptana to provide a smooth integration over the next few months and hope to have things completely transitioned by mid May.

I’d like to thank our community of users, especially those that have been behind the project since the beginning, for validating our work. We are going to need your help in merging these communities and assisting existing Aptana users with our Rails tooling. Please join the Aptana forum and resources to make this process as seamless as possible. Documentation will be the first hurdle and I hope our community can step up to help.

Aptana will continue to keep it open source (Yeeaahh!). The official website for RadRails is now http://radrails.net. The old site’s domain is already not available.

You can see from the new site that there’s a lot of activity in the development of RadRails. That’s really good!

Thank you for making software development available to the masses.  Keep up the good work guys, and keep the open source movement going!