This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Stewart. Original Post: Rails on Windows more of a pain Feed Title: Ponderings On Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.eric-stewart.com/category/programming-ruby.rss Feed Description: This is the Ruby related section of Eric Stewart's weblog. These entries will be the commentary of a long time Java/C++ programmer that started exploring Ruby in 2003. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Stewart Latest Posts From Ponderings On Ruby

It will be no surprise to many if I state that developing with Rails is a sub-par experience on Windows.

In my recent contract work involving Rails I have been primarily using a combination of OS X and Linux for development and happily report things have gone quite smoothly. They should. Ruby and Rails were born and raised on UNIX-ish platforms.

My partner on this project (and frequent pair programming companion) is, however, using Windows and has not had such a smooth ride. Much of the problem is that some scripts don’t execute well from a Windows command prompt, while others don’t work well from Cygwin.

Don’t get me wrong. Once the rails app is developed and running it works smashingly. And the problems we’ve encountered are probably just system configuration issues. But I can’t help wonder how difficult it is for a Windows developer to get a proper introduction to Ruby and Rails when it’s not quite so trivial to get a good development environment set up on Windows.