Like many I suppose Ruby on Rails caught me in it's wave of hype. Once I read a few articles and saw that ActiveState Komodo editor had Ruby support I ordered both the Programming Ruby book and the Agile Ruby on Rails book from Amazon.com. But a month later after doing some experiments I dropped the whole thing. Why? Because Ruby on Rails installation and running on a windows desktop was too much trouble. I like to use wampserver. Installing Rails on to my wampserver instance of Apache 2 webserver made everything Rails. I could no longer do PHP or Perl, the Rails environment took over everything.

So those Ruby books have been sitting on the shelf above my desk for a while, staring at me. But now I think I am ready to give Rails another shot. Why? Because now there is Instant Rails. Instant Rails is a none invasive way of running a Rails ready Apache webserver on windows.

One thing I am excited about is the fact that Instant Rails has the potential to bring a Ruby based CMS similar to Drupal or Joomla into the open source CMS world. Though there are some efforts to do this there has not been any large movement for a community software solution. I think the fact that a Ruby on Rails local development environment on windows is difficult to install has held back many web developers.

If you are a web developer and are wondering about Rails and if it is actually easy to develop web applications with then take a look at this video. I personally do not think that Rails development is easy nor is it for everyone. While the language itself is very easy to understand using the Rails environment is not intuitive enough for my tastes. This is why though I will embrace Rails I will always be pushing for web hosts to install eruby which to me is a better way of presenting the Ruby language to the world. Eruby allows interpretation of Ruby code in a text file just like ASP or PHP. Many I have talked to mistakenly think that this is what Rails does. Disappointed by the truth many drop Ruby and go back to PHP. This a good reason why Ruby on Rails is not the PHP killer that the hype leads one to believe. Another reason that Ruby on Rails is not a good substitute for PHP is that there are no windows binaries for mod_ruby or eruby. This means that you cannot install a ruby interpreter on to Windows IIS or Apache 2 webserver running under windows.

Instant Rails is a step in the right direction for Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But Ruby still has a long way to go before web developers can start writing applications the way PHP or Classic ASP allows. Because of this ports of popular CMS's like Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 to Ruby from PHP will not be happening anytime soon.

Update: For those that want to use Instant Rails as an eRuby server. You can do this but it requires that you use a shebang in your scripts. This is because there is a bug in Apache 1.3 where ScriptInterpreterSource "Registry" does not work. Hopefully, Instant Rails will upgrade to Apache 2 or release a seperate Apache 2 version.

Happy Publishing!

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