Also, remember to think not only about development but about
deployment, monitoring and maintenance.
It will be difficult or impossible for you to make use of Capistrano
(was SwitchTower) when your deployment target is windows:
"I agree that people need to deploy to Windows, but if they do, ST is
not the tool for them. I will not be adding Windows support to ST. ST's
dependency on things like SSH and POSIX scripts is too deep, and
changing that would require a fundamental shift in the way ST does it's
stuff." - Jamis Buck,
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2005/12/23/switchtower-wishlist
While a few people report at least partial success with with Capistrano
on cygwin, a quick google failed to find any concrete write-ups of
this.
I would want to take advantage of the experience and tools of the large
majority of the RoR community which deploys to a 'nix environment.
Whatever you need to do on that platform with RoR, there's increased
likelihood that someone has done it before; community support is more
probable, documentation more plentiful, and bug fixes appear more
quickly.
Yeah. I specialize in solutions that integrate virtual linux servers inside of Windows networks just for this reason. Deployment is so much easier if you can use a linux machine and hide it behind your Windows web server.
We are going to have one Windows 2003 server with 5 virtual servers.
One of them will be for RoR production in Linux. This idea came from a
person in my team that has experience with virtual Linux server inside
a Windows Server (but not using RoR).
It seems like Brian has experience in that too for RoR and it's a good
alternative. So why is some people using Windows if they can make a
linux vps inside it?
Some people just can’t convince their server team to do Linux on VMWare due to their lack of understanding about either VMWare or Linux. You’re not going to allow a production system that runs on a platform you don’t know anything about because when something goes wrong you have to know how to fix it. That’s what I’ve encountered.
