Chris Kutler

Chris Kutler, one of the tutorial divas at blogs.sun.com/divas, writes about Ruby, Ajax, jMaki, and JavaServer Faces. Before becoming a technical writer, Chris worked for 10 years as a computer engineer, which helps her understand the technical audience to which she writes. Chris is also passionate about building customer communities and has responded to thousands of customer postings on the Sun forums and the various NetBeans users aliases.

Brian Leonard

Brian Leonard is a technology evangelist for Sun Microsystems. Brian has over 18 years of software development experience evolving from the terminal, to the desktop, to the Web (and back to the desktop). In his current role, Brian works to create and foster the community around NetBeans and related technologies. NetBeans is a 100% open source integrated development environment for Java, C/C++, Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, and a rapidly expanding list of other languages. Most of Brian’s experience is with Java application servers, working on Java EE servers before there was a standard. Today, as a technology evangelist, Brian relies heavily on his past experiences and has the enviable job of getting to discuss the ever–evolving technology landscape with developers around the world.

As Ruby and Rails continues to grow, and more and more jobs are coming online that require you to effectively develop Ruby and Rails in the web tier. Beyond the Rails framework, there are still very few proven tools and IDEs to get the job done, at least until now. The NetBeans Ruby and Rails IDE, according to some, is by far the best and proven IDE in Ruby and Rails. Who would’ve thought a Java IDE could do Ruby and Rails?

Published with the developer in mind, firstPress technical briefs explore emerging technologies that have the potential to be critical for tomorrow's industry. Apress keeps developers one step ahead by presenting key information as early as possible in a PDF of 150 pages or less. Explore the future through Apress with NetBeans™ Ruby and Rails IDE with JRuby, an officially endorsed NetBeans project book, which is for Ruby and Rails programmers who want to take advantage of the NetBeans IDE to facilitate their Ruby and/or Rails web application development.

Shows you how to use the NetBeans IDE 6.5 in the Ruby and Rails development processes

Gives you in–depth information to help you configure the working environment for your specific Ruby interpreter, application server, and database server

Showcases the NetBeans features that enhance your productivity from project creation, to editing, debugging, and testing

Authors Chris Kutler and Brian Leonard work closely with both the developers of the NetBeans Ruby and Rails IDE project and the user community. The authors’ in–depth knowledge of the numerous product features, in addition to an understanding of how the community uses the product to meet their development practices, enables them to present you the essential information necessary to efficiently and effectively use the tools of this IDE.

What you’ll learn

Getting a fully functional Ruby on Rails environment up and running with a single product installation

Abandoning the command line for all things Rails: project creation, GEM installation, etc.

Working with all facets of your project—source code, databases, web servers—from a single environment

Debugging Ruby code interactively, even the Ruby on Rails source code, to really understand what the Rails framework is doing

Running Ruby applications on the Java VM and deploying Rails applications to Java servlet containers such as GlassFish and Tomcat