Ruby on Rails failed support for Windows Platform
I recently started working with Ruby on Rails and the biggest issue I encountered was the lack of support for it on the Windows platform and since I work with .NET and a lot of other tools which are windows only a switch to Linux or Mac was out of the question.
I went to great lengths to setup an Ubuntu server running inside of VirtualBox with port forwarding’s between the Gust and Host OS for the HTTP, FTP, SSH and MySQL protocols so that I could develop on a supported Linux platform and still not have to give up Windows.
All though it worked great when I was using it with Vim over PuTTY or other code editors over FTP but it was unusable with IDE’s like NetBeans and RadRails.
At this point I had become frustrated with these problems as I had spent enormous amount of my time on getting Ruby and its ecosystem fully working on the Windows platform and I had all most given up on it.
I was just about ready to make do with the virtual machine solution that I had setup before.
But then I found the BitNami RubyStack which turned out to be the best solution that I have tested on the Windows platform by far. It includes packed and ready to run copies of Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails with all their dependencies upon its installation.
I have been using it for about a month now and so far I have not encountered any problems or issues that I could not solve but keep in mind that the stack is still running on top of Windows so you will encounter occasional problems especially while installing some gems & plug-ins.
It’s a real shame that there is no official support for the Windows platform because if it was supported it would open Ruby & its ecosystem to a large number of developers that can’t switch to other platforms or might be hesitant of the mess that awaits them if they decide to use it on Windows.
If you have done any Rails development on Windows or other platforms then don’t forget to drop a line sharing your experiences.
