Aptana RadRails IDE and InstantRails

So, I'm doing this new startup thing--can't tell you just yet what the thing is--from the very scratch and Mark asked me keep a blog about it. Here goes...

Yesterday was spent setting up my development environment. In short, this is composed of two things:

• InstantRails
• Aptana IDE with RadRails Plug-In

And the key is figuring out how to get the them to play nicely together. So far, I ran into only two glitches:

1. Installed InstantRails, then installed Aptana IDE, then installed RadRails Plug-In. But, the plug-in wasn't working which I could tell because it's configuration options weren't appearing in the preferences. From reading this post I learned that it turns out I needed to upgrade my Java JDK to 1.5+. Yay. Also, turns out you can't just easily upgrade from within the JDK 1.4 (what I had) Control Panel tool to the latest version. You have to uninstall, find the new package, install, blah...yay.
   


2. Got the RR Plug-In working, started reading the RR help documentation and it says there's some configurations that I need to setup. Even though the RR configs are appearing in the Aptana IDE prefs, the specific configs they mention are not to be found in the location where the screenshot in the docs say to look for them. Ug. Maybe the install didn't work...so, uninstall, re-install...everything. No luck. Some posts I read say don't install one sub-package of the RR plug-in (the Ruby Development Tools, RDT)...okay, uninstall, re-install without package...no luck.
   
   Turns out, this was a bug in the documentation. The configurations had been moved to a new area of the preferences, but the documentation hadn't been updated. Oy!


3. Finally, This article on the InstantRails wiki describes how to configure RadRails so that they play nicely together. I set the configs and was all set. Hooray!
   

Note on the title: Progress vs. Perfection...what's it mean?
Some could interpret it as a form of saying quantity is preferable to quality, but that's not what it means to me. In my view, it's about staying focused on the goal while demonstrating respect for the Law of Diminishing Returns.