Topic: Rails on Windows / IIS with Rails

Heheheh glad the cat’s out of the bag on that. Been wanting to mention that.

Topic: Rails on Windows / Rails on Windows book - suggestions for topics

@Brian Eng: Yeah… that’s a big deal, but you know what? The best solution is to actually make a web service that authenticates you and then invoke that. We cheated by using CAS on a lot of projects (since ANYTHING can authenticate through that). But it’s still important to cover. Also, re: article on the wiki – I’ve read it, and also been talking with MS on the FastCGI stuff although I am not convinced that FastCGI is acceptable as a platform, no matter what OS you’re on.

@Huw: I like your point about the visual design and it’s not something I’ve thought about before. I’m a hand-coder, as are many of the people in the Rails community. Telling people they will have to hand-code their forms might alienate some people, but there are not yet any options for visually designing forms for rails. (You can use dreamweaver, but you don’t have the <%=text_field %> helpers.). Really good point.

Re: Apache and IIS… I have my articles and I will probably just reference the other book I’m writing so I don’t get in trouble with the two publishers :( That book’s been in development for well over 7 months and I had to contribute a new draft of my chapter with updated contents.

Can you elaborate on the CLR bridge stuff, maybe via my email so we don’t hijack the thread? bphogan at gmail would work for that.

@Jon: Great idea. Not sure what msbuild is (cos as I said, i skipped .Net but know a few .Netters so I picked up some things). The rest of those are good.

Topic: Rails on Windows / Rails on Windows book - suggestions for topics

@Huw: Interesting… but I don’t know if that’s really in scope for this book. We’re trying to focus on things that are specific to Rails on Windows, although I really like that idea because it could be useful to anybody!

@Chris: Integrating COM and .Net with Rails, huh? Interesting. I’ve done that before, and you know what? I walked away from that because it ties you to Windows a little TOO much. One of the selling points about Rails is that it is truly platform-independent. However, you raise a great point for a topic that I will start thinking about – integrating Rails with your infrastructure. Might be nice to talk about using an ActiveDirectory authentication scheme, etc. COM and .Net integration coupld probably done using some sort of service oriented architecture pattern, whether it is SOAP or RESTful. It certainly is worth mentioning how you might wrap COM or .NET objects and libraries but point out the limitations of doing so and offer alternatives. Good thinking.

Your second point, about comparing .Net to Rails, would be quite useful. My .Net experience is actually quite limited, as I avoided it when it came out (went from ASP to PHP instead, but always worked in an MS environment.) You actually have two different areas – the Ruby language itself, and how dynamic that is, and then the .Net framework vs. the Rails framework. I really think that could be useful so I want to pursue that, time permitting.

Keep the ideas coming. What other problem areas do we face on Windows?

Topic: Vent / RailsConf 2007

@Brian: I’m going, would be willing to do some live blogging.

Topic: Rails on Windows / Text Editors & Rails

Well, it’s not free for me cos I don’t have Visual Studio. I need to rectify that so I can include Ruby in Stell in my book though.

Topic: Rails on Windows / render :action => :hello_world

Thanks so much for doing this. You’re going to make a lot of people really happy.

Topic: Rails on Windows / Text Editors & Rails

I use a custom setup of Eclipse that I put together before RadRails came out… I packaged it up last June so that others could use it instead of building it themselves, but it’s still Eclipse, which means it can be slow. (http://www.napcs.com/products/rails/Eclipse/index.htm). I’m probably going to discontinue this one now that Radrails is getting closer to complete.

But I really like RoRED as well.. it’s really nice and the developer has some great ideas. (http://www.plasmacode.com/)

Finally, I really like Notepad ++ as a general editor. It understands Ruby syntax, though it’s not great with RHTML yet. (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm)

Also watching InType, but e looks really cool as well.

Topic: Rails on Windows / ActiveRecord + Sql Server

You can do it with the ADO adapter or just create an ODBC DSN and call the DSN. This method is preferred if you actually plan to deploy the program on a Linux server, since the ADO method works only on Windows.

Topic: Rails on Windows / Rails on Windows book - suggestions for topics

How timely!

I’m working on a book for O’Reilly that covers this very topic. What sort of topics do you find most troubling? I’ve been doing Rails on Windows for over two years now and it really is amazing how well most of it works. Deployment still hurts a bit though.

• Installing Ruby, Rails, Mongrel
• Installing MySQL, mysql-ruby bindings
• Using MS SQL Server
• Installing SVN and Tortoise
• Seting up your own repository and serving it with SVNServe
• Installing RMagick
• Installing AutoTest
• Installing and configuring Capistrano for deployment to Linux servers *IDEs
  • RadRails
  • RoRED
  • Eclipse For Rails
  • Ruby In Steel
  • Komodo
• Other editors
  • VIM + rails Plugin

I’d like to cover deployment in this book too but that’s a touchy subject as I’ve already written that for another book for a different publisher.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Topic: Rails on Windows / IIS with Rails

Well, I wrote the articles listed above http://www.napcs.com/howto/rails/deploy/) and I work with Rails on Windows quite frequently. The solutions I outlined work great, but what works even better is using a VM as Mike Gunderloy suggested. The upcoming Rails deployment book will have more information on this subject.

Windows deployment is actually very easy… it’s just slow, and that’s because Ruby run slow on Windows. Until that gets fixed, you’ll just need more resources.

Running Rails in IIS is just not a good idea. You can make the applications appear to run through IIS which lets you embed the apps anywhere in your site structure and even use your certificates, but you should handle integration between apps by making them talk using REST or another method rather than adopting any proprietary integration techniques that rely on IIS.