Ruby On Rails Development with M$ Windows
I have been playing with Ruby On Rails for a while now. While it is super easy to use and brilliantly designed, the development tools on a M$ Windows machine are lacking (to say the least). That being said, through many hours of frustration and heartache, I have finally come to the following solution:
Development Machine
- Windows Explorer - Navigating directory structures
- Powertoy to “Open CMD window here” - simple right-click addition to open a command window from any directory (saves a lot of typing trying to navigate from within the command window
- Notepad++ - Nice and simple text editor, fairly intuitive. Don’t use Windows Notepad, the line line breaks are in the incorrect format for a *nix server (which you will most likely be using at some point).
- Tortoise SVN - Very easy to use Subversion client that integrates directly into the shell of Windows Explorer like it was meant to be there (how sweet would that be?).
- MySQL AB - I use the included command line client, it takes some getting used to, but in the RoR world, command line is the de-facto standard for getting things done.
Server
- Subversion! - An absolute must for development! I don’t know how I ever accomplished anything without it. For those not in the know, subversion is a version control system for anything. It is super powerful and I use maybe 10% of it’s feature set.
- Shovel - this isn’t so much a program as a tool. Shovel is a recipe for Capistrano that makes deploying you subversioned RoR application dead simple.
That’s it! I tried using RadRails, and it works, but it is overly complicated. I tried a number of text editors, but Notepad++ seems to work the best (at least for me it does). I like tools that don’t get in my way. You will notice that there isn’t a big Integrated Development Enviroment (IDE) listed here. I don’t like them for the small projects that I am working on.
