When you’re about to start a new project it’s the right time to move to something new. Sometimes it’s a new CSS or Javascript framework, sometimes it’s a new version control system, in my case it was moving from PHP/CodeIgniter to Ruby/Ruby on Rails.

I started out in my windows 7 laptop and came across a myriad of problems. The first time there was encoding problems. Google came to the rescue. Then I had to configure the system PATH variable a few times since there was no documentation to tell me what to configure. It worked out fine. After a lot of hours I reached the point where I have a working Rails 3 installation but no virtual hosts and of course no sub domains. Unfortunately Passenger doesn’t work on windows and it’s developers don’t plan a release anytime soon. So since I can’t find documentation on virtual hosts with ruby and I’m quite tired of googling I gave up on the idea.

Next stop was Ubuntu. The Rails version in the latest Ubuntu is still 2.x. There are no official repositories to give you a Rails 3 installation out of the box so the most reasonable option is RVM. To make a long story short, after a few hours of trying, it didn’t work. I’m quite well aware that other people have had more success than me but unfortunately for me things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.

In PHP/apache world there are installers for windows that just work out of the box. In any Linux distribution things are even better. So since I don’t own a mac and I can’t spare any more time things are quite clear. The way I see it deployment for Rails is still lacking in options. Maybe Rails is a great way to build web applications and maybe it could save me time in the long run. But the way things are now, it just waists me time. So I’m sticking with CodeIgniter and I’ll revisit Rails next year when it will hopefully be more mature.