I resisted for a long time, but there is a talk coming up in the Düsseldorf Java User Group about JRuby, so I really want to get to know what this Ruby thing is all about. Up to now I thought that PHP is good enough to be complement for Java for low scale projects and prototype, but however, we need software that is able to be integrated. I was not so successfully getting a Java<->PHP Integration running, so perhaps this can be done with Ruby?

Let me quickly take you along with my Getting Started experience:

  1. Google for “Ruby on Rails getting started”
  2. From

    http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/GettingStartedWithRails

    got to

    http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsOnWindows

    A bit lost there but found a nice installer on

    http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

  3. Install the stack, wait for 30 Minutes until Ruby has extracted thousands of yaml files.
  4. The stack pretended to have a demo application ready on port 3000, but this was not configured.
    Also the Ruby on Rails wiki pages were not very helpful on how to finalize this last setup step.
    I found a README in the application directory. That one told me to invoke script/server…
    Well.. I tried. Windows said: command or file not found.
    The file itself has:
    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    How is that supposed to work on Windows?
    Even creating an new project with “rails” command which was found in path correctly does produce unix shell scripts…
    Ah!

    http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/ShebangChangeScripts

    ruby -i.bak -pe 'gsub!("#!/usr/local/bin/ruby", "#!c:/ruby/bin/ruby")' public/dispatch.* script/*

    and now? The command did not succeed, even after fixing the permission errors, because the script tries to modify folders and the path being incorrect, its still a unix shell script.. not a windows command script. Though not working.

  5. okay, I was bold and tried invoking “ruby script/server” and surprise that did work! And even the application was running.

90 Minutes for getting the welcome screen of a ruby app under windows. not very impressive. Lets hope application development is more convenient.

Lets see how my Ruby experiments will go on. I better open a new category for it.