As a web professional and self-admitted nerd, new technology has always interested me and when it applies to the web it’s a double bonus win. So for the last couple of years I’d been hearing all about the glory of Ruby on Rails and how it makes programming almost thoughtless through its smart use of metaprogramming and RESTful application architectures/programming paradigms I wanted to give it a shot.
I also knew it had a pretty steep learning curve, especially for people used to the Microsoft style of “programming” (that’s the only dig I’m gonna make on MS for now I guess). But over the last few months I like to think I’ve come a pretty long way in terms of understanding how Rails works overall as well as in terms of power-usage of the command line.
But the thing I can’t seem to conquer is the stigma surrounding Rails on Windows. Yeah, I’ve got BitNami RubyStack and InstantRails to get me up and running, but there is so much stuff that seems to be just implied/accepted/general knowledge about, well, everything surrounding Rails by those in the Mac/Linux community that it is extremely difficult to make any headway on Windows.
For instance, I’m attempting to use one of many application templates. I’ve tried a few, actually, and even some fully-contained Content Management Systems:
And have run into minor problems with a few (Radiant comes to mind) where a gem-based plugin wouldn’t install or configure correctly to the template just flat out not working for a plethora of reasons (BORT, Beet and Seed I’m looking at you). Most of which stem from the generators using Unix commands to set things up.
Beet, for instance, uses the “curl” command to pull some jQuery files and other stuff…that doesn’t exist in Windows; and Seed needed the “emacs” command for setting up a few aspects of it…again, not something found in Windows. And the guides I was following offered no work-around or alternate way to accomplish the same task in Windows.
THANKS!
I’m new at this. And I have read the fucking manual. A number of them. Numerous times. I’ve Googled. I’ve done everything I can and it seems like there’s this rather large piece missing between uber-n00b stuff (which I’ve got down) and the intermediate-to-advanced stuff which I mostly understand when looking at and attempting things in one-off situations but cannot seem to bridge with the uber-n00b stuff because there is nothing that helps me get there.
I’m stuck on Windows. That’s just my predicament. Rails is supposed to work on all platforms and yet I feel like I’m a pariah shunned for using the most popular and widely available operating system on the planet. I know it’s not perfect, but ffs why does it have to be this hard? Does the Rails community really not want anything to do with me because I’m on Windows?
Tags: programming, rails, ruby, ruby on rails, web development
