Bypass "public html" and go straight to a controller, or not?

I’m wondering what the general consensus is for utilizing Apache for the static content and only using Mongrel/WEBrick/etc for the Ruby code. From the resource perspective, it’s a rather obvious choice. From the development perspective, it’s not so clear. I personally don’t care to have Apache on my development machine and enjoy the flexibility of developing my projects across multiple computers. To develop, all I need to do is checkout my code from Subversion and start a Mongrel instance. No Apache config, etc. My application is right there, complete, and ready to roll. If I had the Apache layer, I’d need to spend time configuring that.

What I generally do is create a “home” or “welcome” controller that simply drives pages like about us, contact, directions, etc. All of the URL mappings are done in the routes file.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

I'm wondering what the general consensus is for utilizing Apache for the static content and only using Mongrel/WEBrick/etc for the Ruby code. From the resource perspective, it's a rather obvious choice. From the development perspective, it's not so clear. I personally don't care to have Apache on my development machine and enjoy the flexibility of developing my projects across multiple computers. To develop, all I need to do is checkout my code from Subversion and start a Mongrel instance. No Apache config, etc. My application is right there, complete, and ready to roll. If I had the Apache layer, I'd need to spend time configuring that.

What I generally do is create a "home" or "welcome" controller that simply drives pages like about us, contact, directions, etc. All of the URL mappings are done in the routes file.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Why do you need apache for development? Mongrel will serve up static files and Rails just fine...

I used to develop "mongrel only" quite a bit. I don't now, but that's for reason completely outside of this...

-philip