A new Aptana RadRails book has been released. Aptana community member Javier Ramirez's "Aptana RadRails: An IDE For Rails Development" (Packt Publishing, May 2008) is now available. Find it at Amazon, or direct from Packt (where its a tad cheaper it seems), or at other fine book establishments around the world!

Here's the summary:

A comprehensive guide to using RadRails to develop your Ruby on Rails projects in a professional and productive manner

• Comprehensive guide to using RadRails during the whole development cycle
• Code Assistance, Graphical Debugger, Testing, Integrated Console
• Manage your gems, plug-ins, servers, generators, and Rake tasks
• Rails 2.0-ready
• Includes a chapter about Subversion and Database integration
• Smart Code Assistants for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Aptana RadRails is an Integrated Development Environment for Ruby on Rails projects. Built on top of the well-known Eclipse platform, RadRails provides all the tools you need to create a whole Rails application from a single interface, allowing you to focus on the creative part of the development as your IDE takes care of the mechanics.

What you will learn from this book

This book will show you how to use the tools RadRails provides to improve your productivity:

• Tools for writing code: Specialized Editors for Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; >> Code Assistance; Code Completion; Refactoring; Quick Code Navigation; Outline Views
• Tools for testing and debugging: Unit Testing; Graphical Debugger; Monitoring of Log Files
• Tools for project management: Specialized views for launching your Tasks and Generators; Management of your Gems and Plug-ins; Rails Servers Control
• You will also learn how to use other Eclipse plug-ins for synchronizing your projects with Subversion and for managing your databases.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Ruby on Rails developers who want to make the most of the framework by using an Integrated Development Environment.

Even though the book explains everything you need to follow the contents, the focus is on how to use the tool and not on the Rails framework itself, so previous working knowledge of Rails is highly advisable. Previous knowledge of Eclipse is not necessary.

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Author: Javier Ramírez

Javier Ramírez has been developing Web Applications since before the term Web Application was coined. Born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1974, he started programming as a hobby around the age of 11 assisted by his older sister. A few years later, he got his first modem and became a regular of BBSes and Newsgroups. His interest in developing server applications that can be accessed remotely comes from those times.

He has learned —and forgotten— many programming languages, including Basic, dBase III, Cobol, Pascal, SQL, C, C++, ASP, TCL, JavaScript, PHP, and Java, the language on which he has focused for most of his career so far. He has held the positions of programmer, analyst, consultant, team leader, post-sales engineer, project manager, and software architect, totaling over 12 years in the IT business.

Having developed projects mainly for banks and other big corporations in Spain, Italy and the US, he co-founded some years ago a small software development shop, which provided him with valuable experience about the difficulties and the joys of entrepreneurship. After two years, he left the company in pursuit of new professional challenges.

For the last two years, he has been proudly working for ASPgems, where he discovered Ruby on Rails, which soon became his framework of choice for developing Web Applications. He is one of the organizers of the Spanish Rails Conference, also participating as a Speaker in the two events held so far.

He has also been an instructor on Robotics, Java, FatWire Content Server, and Ruby on Rails, and a University Lecturer in the subjects of 'Software Engineering' and 'The Java Programming Language', which he currently teaches at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, in Madrid.

Javier Ramírez holds a B.Sc. in Business Information Systems with First Class Honors and a degree in Ingeniería en Sistemas de Computación.

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Javier's other postings in the Aptana forums

Next week Aptana will be at AjaxWorld (NYC), iPhone Developer Summit (NYC), and EclipseCon (Silicon Valley). Join us. We want to meet you, answer your questions, and get your feedback and ideas to make Aptana Studio and Aptana Jaxer even better for you. (Of course you can do that anytime via our ASAP enhancement request system too).

AjaxWorld, March 18-20, New York, NY
Kevin Hakman presents Aptana Studio: Your Unfair Advantage for AJAX, iPhone, Adobe AIR, PHP and Rails Development and Rapid Development of Enterprise Ajax Apps both on Wednesday, March 19.

iPhone Developer Summit, March 18-20, New York, NY
Also on Wednesday March 19, Kevin Hakman presents Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.

EclipseCon, March 17-19, Santa Clara, CA
Eclipse Monkey committer and Aptana engineer Ingo Muschenetz shares Building Eclipse-based Products: A View From the Trenches on March 18, and Aptana engineer Kevin Sawicki delivers Pimp My Editor with insights for extending and customizing features in Eclipse.

We'll also be at the EclipseCon Ajax focused Birds of a Feather meeting -- check the schedule for details.

I'm happy to announce that RadRails 1.0 has been released today. This release has been a long time coming and includes a lot of new features and polish. We're especially proud of the progress we've made here at Aptana since we took over the project. RadRails 0.7.2 users will definitely want to check out this new release - it offers a more stable environment, full Rails 2.0 support, support for JRuby, and a boatload of new features. For those who want the comprehensive list of changes since the 0.9.3 release, you can find the changelist in ASAP.

The highlights include:

• A new Rails Shell console - A screencast dedicated to this feature is available at aptana.tv.
• Bundled auto-installing gems for rails development
• A Ruby profiler for Pro users
• An RDoc preview view
• Extended RHTML/ERb color preferences
• Code completion for ActiveRecord model fields and finders
• Code completion suggesting method call arguments
• Significant expansion of code warnings and analysis, including syntax changes from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9
• An improved look and feel

These new features join an already impressive set of functionality:

• A Fast Ruby debugger
• RHTML, YML, HTML, JS, and CSS editors with code assist.
• Unit testing integration and GUI
• Refactoring
• Code analysis and warnings
• IDE Scriptable via Ruby
• Much, much more!

Please note that unless you've been using 1.0.0 nightlies Aptana/Eclipse will not automatically update you to 1.0. You'll need to force an install of RadRails 1.0 via the Start Page, Plugins Manager, or Software update mechanism that you used to initially install RadRails. For those who prefer to use the Software Update route, the update site URL for RadRails is: http://update.aptana.com/update/rails/3.2/