Back in April, we posted about the release of the beta of RubyMine 1.0, an IntelliJ IDEA based Ruby and Rails IDE. This month, the final RubyMine 1.0 was released for public consumption. It's a great IDE - check out the free 30 day trial to get a feel for it.

The Quick-Fire Feature List

RubyMine has a pretty crazy feature set. Just some of the biggest points to whet your appetite:

• Code completion
• Automatic code inspections - basic errors pointed out with one-click quick fixes.
• Advanced navigation - including seeing overridden methods on the fly
• Version control integration - SVN, Git, CVS, and Perforce
• Integrated gem manager
• IRB and Rails consoles
• Assisted unit testing - supporting RSpec, Test::Unit, and test/spec
• Quick documentation lookups
• Suitable for use with MRI Ruby 1.8.x, JRuby, IronRuby, and MacRuby. Does not support 1.9-specific features yet.

If you want to learn more about the background, motivation, and technical details behind RubyMine, check out this awesome interview with JetBrains developer Dmitry Jemerov.

Praise!

IDEs don't tend to be popular in Rubyland, but from observing people's responses to RubyMine both online and at RailsConf, I think RubyMine might well be the first cross-platform Ruby IDE that developers actually seem to love in droves. Short of a few minor issues, I'm seeing very little negative towards RubyMine, and even a few people who supposedly "hate" IDEs have given it a fair trial - high praise, indeed.

But.. It's A Commercial Product

Depending on your stance, one potential downside is that RubyMine is not an open source IDE. It's a proprietary product available under two licenses, a free license for proven open source developers (there are some criteria), and the more typical $99/£74 commercial license. Compared to what JetBrains charges for its Java IDE, this is a bargain, though ultimately may be hard for some Rubyists to stomach. Luckily a thirty day trial is available to challenge your opinions..

Coming down the line, RubyMine 1.1 is already in the release candidate stage, and in the fall will be coming RubyMine 1.5 with anticipated support for Ruby 1.9, Cucumber, RCov, an integrated SQL console, and improved refactoring tools.

Disclaimer: JetBrains, the company behind RubyMine, is a sponsor of Ruby Inside. This is not a "sponsored post," however.