Over the past few weeks I have increasingly found myself unhappy developing Rails applications in NetBeans 6. While I was initially happy with the productivity boost from moving from writing applications in nano to using a full IDE I found myself reverting to using nano. The reason was simply that NetBeans was putting too much load on my desktop system. The system isn’t exactly slow (Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB RAM) yet when running NetBeans the system load was hovering between 4 and 5 making development tedious. Before trying NetBeans I had read a lot about various IDE’s and I decided to revisit that research. One consistent complement to Eclipse with RadRails was that the performance was snappy. I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to expand my Rails IDE experiences.

I’ve been reading good things about the newest versions of NetBeans as an IDE for Ruby on Rails development. I decided to try it out and see if it worked well for me. the current NetBeans packages in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) are version 5.5. So to try out the new version I had to download it and install it manually.