Many Rails developers are perfectly happy working on their code in a text editor – and there are certainly plenty of excellent text editors out there. But others, particularly those who have come to Rails from another platform, find themselves wanting a full integrated development environment. For the latter group of developers, there’s good news: two major cross-platform Rails IDEs have releases available now.

Aptana’s RadRails (a plugin for their Aptana Studio IDE) has just released version 1.2. This Eclipse-based environment will seem instantly familiar to many users, and version 1.2 has a couple of major advances to boast about. First, it includes a wizard that will aid new users in setting up Ruby, Gems, and Rails; this is likely to be especially useful to those coming to Rails on Windows. Second, it has built-in deployment to Aptana’s Cloud Connect scalable deployment service, giving a pain-free way to get your Rails applications up and running.

Also worth a look is JetBrains’ RubyMine, currently in late beta prior to its commercial release. A purpose-built Rails IDE, it offers a variety of features including rake support, a model diagrammer, built-in web previews, and code quality tools. RubyMine isn’t finished yet, but the current beta version is showing good promise.

Both RadRails and RubyMine have the features you’d expect from an IDE, including flexible code editors, refactoring support, built-in hooks for test running, integrated debugging, and source code integration. RadRails comes in both community and $99 Pro editions, while RubyMine is scheduled to be released at $99. Whether you prefer to work in a text editor or an IDE, the appearance of these applications is yet another sign of the continuing popularity and growth of the Rails ecosystem.