Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Rails on Windows

I've been working on a Rails project at work for the last few weeks.  We've been targeting JRuby for deployment and therefore I've been working primarily in JRuby for development.  This week I thought it'd be nice to get running with the regular MRI with MySQL instead of Derby.  I installed cygwin and tried to get back to doing things at the command line (I've been using NetBeans)...  I was getting tired of the performance hit I was taking every time I ran a rake task or a generator or started up Mongrel.  I was under the impression that the MRI ran as well on Windows as it does on my Mac.  Not even close.  Performance still sucks and managing the differences between my JRuby installation and my cygwin hosted Ruby isn't much fun.  I'm about ready to bail and just go back to JRuby.  Now I know why people buy Macs to do Rails development.  It rocks.  Rails development on Windows on the other hand truly sucks.  Thank goodness JRuby and NetBeans are there to hand me a few niceties.  Otherwise I'm not sure I'd have the patience for it.