[SOLVED] Syntax Checking or "Compiling" a Ruby on Rails Application

Syntax Checking or "Compiling" a Ruby on Rails Application

I'm new to Ruby and recently ran into an issue comparing to values when creating a Ruby on Rails application. In a controller I had the following statement that always returned false:

if (user.id != params[:id])

The problem was the user.id (which is an Active Record) is an integer and params[:id] is a string. It took me a while to figure this out and I finally changed it to:

if (user.id != params[:id].to_i)

Now the statement works as expected.

To avoid this error in the future is there a way to "compile" or get Ruby to warn you if you try to compare 2 different types? Some other issues I've ran into that I would like to "compile check" are:

Warn me if I create a variable but don't use it. To help check for typos in variable names.
Make sure a method exists in a Class so I can avoid method name typos and also to help refactoring, for example if I rename a method.

I'm currently using Ruby 1.8.6-27 RC2 with Rails 2.3.2 and RadRails IDE on Windows.

Solution

The best solution I found was a IDE that did on-the-fly syntax checking, such as RubyMine. I'm not sure if it would have solved my original problem but it has helped me find and fix several other syntax and compile errors. Thank you everyone for your suggestions.