I am a novice developer who works to improve my skills.
I am a bit confused about the state of JRuby and whether this is a viable alternative to switching from MRI.
I am currently running a Mac at home and editing using textedit (MRI for ruby, terminal for rails commands, etc.). At work, I use NetBeans for Windows, but do not work on Ruby.
I'm seriously thinking of dropping the Mac for reasons unrelated to this conversation, but I'm worried that when I'm on Windows, Ruby support will be less optimal (I might be wrong about that).
I really enjoy working with Netbeans at work, and I see that using JRuby on Windows with Netbeans and letting JRuby manage its gems would be a relatively enjoyable experience. I like the idea of code completion and a complete IDE, not a text editor (without starting a flame in the editor).
My question is, is JRuby going to complicate training rails? From what I saw, some gems are not supported on JRuby, otherwise, this ecosystem can be done slightly differently. As a student, I follow a lot of textbooks from the Internet and from books, and I worry that everything may not work or it will be difficult to work on JRuby. Is this skepticism justified? Or will it be a relatively painless switch? How does this affect deployment on platforms other than JRuby, such as Heroku, etc.?
I am still weighing many options, including MRI on Windows, MRI or JRuby on OpenSolaris, etc. I think that in any case, I will work with Netbeans.
Any comments are welcome.