RadRails 0.6.3 and getting my Ruby/Rails house in order on my Mac really helped

As I mentioned last week, I was experiencing a few new problems after upgrading to RailsRails 0.6.2

It looks like problems were coming at me from several difference sources. Here are at least a couple of them.

1. regression bug in RadRails 0.6.2 which caused context-assist (control+space auto-completion) to fail
2. my failure to define an up-to-date Ruby On Rails and Ruby environment outside of the RadRails IDE

Before, I was completely relying on a Rails bundle within Locomotive for to provide the environment for Creating a Rails application environment.


I think I remember hearing that RadRails needs an external environment defined which includes Ruby On Rails and Rails. And, it needs an up-to–date one as well.

Fortunately, I recently spotted an extremely useful tutorial on using Mac OS X for developing Rails applications by Apple Computer.

The tutorial included a link to a wonderful page containing step-by-step instructions for Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. It was complete, and it results in the latest versions of all the programs Ruby On Rails needs, including itself, being installed in /usr/local. That was precisely what I wanted to do!


So this weekend, I did that. The process went smoothly.

Afterwards, I launched RadRails (0.6.2) and told it where these things were. It got much happier. It was still not quite itself - but very close. That was where I left things last night (Sunday).


This evening, I updated RadRails from version 0.6.2 to 0.6.3. This is now a piece of cake, thanks to the RadRails team using the Eclipse update feature. It probably made their builds a little more complicated. However, it sure makes life nice for us RadRails users!

Things in the IDE seem pretty close to working the way the RadRails guys intended now.


My hat is off to: Apple, Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic, the RadRails team, and the Eclipse developers.

If you are doing Ruby On Rails development on a Macintosh - and you are having some problems with your environment or running the right commands - visit the pages I cited and you will get yourself quickly unstuck.