Do you have a Rails development environment running under Windows you're happy with?

Question

Hi,

My current Rails development environment is Aptana + RadRails plugin on Windows XP and it's a little slow running tests, rake, and generators.

If you've evolved and proven your Windows Ruby on Rails development environment into something you're happy with and is fast, please share the details below.

Many thanks,

Eliot

Answer 1

I am led to believe that Rails (well, Ruby, really) on Windows is generally slow, compared to *n[iu]x, but since I haven't experienced the latter, I remain blissfully ignorant. In particular, there's a lag while the Rails environment loads that is tedious even on a fairly fast (3GHz Xeon) box.

On top of that, there's the overhead that an IDE brings. Of the more recent, I've tried NetBeans and RubyMine. Both are very capable and a little slow, compared to my normal working environment of command line and test editor, which pretty much suffice 95% of the time: I find I don't need much IDE support when I'm developing test-first. I still find myself mostly using SciTE, largely because of the "Run" command being easily accessible. With a little tweak to the "require test_helper" line in my tests, a single test execution is no more than a F5 away, and the whole suite available from the command line with a quick "rake".

If I need to debug into the framework to clear up (usually) some misunderstanding on my part, then I currently lean towards NetBeans, where the debugger seems a little more intuitive. I suspect RubyMine may have more power, but I haven't found myself needing it yet.

Irrespective of all the above though, the key to performance on Windows is the time to execute `environment.rb' and that's not an easy nut to crack. (Here's hoping I'm totally wrong and I've missed something super-cool, btw.)

Answer 2

Hi Eliot,

Although I work primarily with ubuntu now, I was using a windows machine with Vim on it. Vim has a plugin called rails.vim. It understands the rails structure very well. These the things I found very useful.

1. Navigation between model, controller, unit test, functional test within 3-4 keystrokes using :RModel, RUnittest, :RFunctionaltest, RController.
2. Ability to run a unit/funtional/integration test right away using :Rake
3. A quick jump to console using :RConsole
4. A quick jump to helpers using :RHelper
5. the goto file 'gf' shortcut now behaves in a predictable manner. It even looks up files inside gems you have installed.

The video on the site hardly does any justice to it. If you are not a vim user, then I would suggest E text editor. It is not free but worth every penny you pay.

Regards, Vagmi

Answer 3

http://www.akitaonrails.com/2009/1/13/the-best-environment-for-rails-on-windows

try this guide

Answer 4

I would seriously consider against Rails development inside Windows and my reasoning behind it is because you won't be using a Windows machine in production.

You will most likely be running some sort of Linux machine because Passenger wont work on Windows, mongrel_cluster (last time I checked) also doesn't run on Windows and IIS is a nightmare. Trust me, consistency between development and production is a huge bonus.

If you must run Windows, then I would recommend running Rails inside a Virtual Machine with a Linux distribution of your choice. That way you could use something like e-texteditor (which comes highly recommended as a great alternative to Textmate) and have a Samba share to a git/svn repository on your Virtual Machine.

Check VMWare Server out and install CentOS / Ubuntu. It's free and will give you an insight into development in Linux which is ultimately where you want to be at.

Answer 5

To add on to Omar: instead of dealing with VMWare, you could install Portable Ubuntu, which runs inside Windows. Though you will get a performance hit from doing so, it will give you a Linux environment to work in and you won't have to worry about installing another operating system.

Answer 6

I'd recommend jruby for windows.

Answer 7

If there are not immutable reasons that you are using Windows XP, you should just switch to Linux. There are none of the weird compatibility issues that arise on Windows. If your application will eventually be deployed to a linux machine, it's easier to develop on. Plus, it would solve your performance issues.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails

If there are constrains that make Windows absolutely necessary, please revise and specify.

Answer 8

Ruby in Steel isn't bad if you want to use Visual Studio.

It's got it's issues, but it's not as "slow" as the eclipse variants I've tried. RadRails so far has the most complete code completion I've seen, as it knows about your models and such far more than Ruby in Steel. Even if it's slow to load the data for it, at least it's there.