Installing Ruby on Rails almost everywhere
I am happy to have successfully installed my first Ruby on Rails full corporate application in these fine platforms:
- Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" (development and test, in my old and faithful G3 iBook)
- Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" (development and test, in my G5 desktop) before and after installing Xcode 2.2 tools (special article)
- Windows XP (development and test, in my employer's Dell Latitude D600 notebook)
- Windows Server 2003, with Apache 2 and FastCGI (production) (special article)
In all of these systems, I've only run Rails on top of MySQL (4 and 5) so far; I will try with other database systems in the future as well, even if MySQL is an absolutely great database system. Particularly I am interested in SQL Server / Oracle (for corporate clients these remain first-class choices) and SQLite for lighter installations.
Anyway, I'm amazed to see just how versatile and portable Rails can be! The setups are not always simple, but with the help of the Rails community, it is really worth doing it.
Actually I see Rails with very special eyes right now; Ruby is an amazing programming language, very powerful yet extremely easy to learn, and Rails all in all is an incredible platform. Yes, because I consider Rails to be a cutting-edge development platform, one that could very likely go mainstream and corporate in 2006. I do not see any problems for that. Lightweight for development, in any platform, and scalable for production use. Fast, small, in a word: beautiful. And if all that was not enough, free and open source.
I am getting really excited about all this. I have been doing web applications since 1996, and Rails is just the way i should have been doing them in the first place. I will definitely contribute to spread the word on Rails and develop all my future applications with it, without a doubt.