silk and spinach

I’m starting out on two new Rails projects this week, so I’ve been investing some time in getting Eclipse configured nicely. There are dozens of helpful websites containing helpful advice, and after much trial and error I found a couple of these that worked really well for me.

For setting up RDT (the Ruby Development Tools) I found Brian Hogan’s Setting up a Rails Development Environment on Windows Using Eclipse to be the most complete and accurate resource. However, it doesn’t cover RadRails. For that, I recommend Victor Kane’s RadRails Tutorials. Both of these sites provided complete and correct advice that worked straight out of the box.

But only after I had spent much of last week struggling with the Cygwin version of ruby. I’ve been an old Unix hand since before I could walk (I wrote some small parts of the System V kernel, would you believe). So when I work on a Windows box, one of my first actions has always been to install Cygwin and make it seem a little more like “home”. But not any more. It’s just too hard to get Cygwin, Ruby, gems, Eclipse, Rails, Apache, MySQL and Subversion all working together. Either the DLL versions are in conflict with each other, or something coredumps regularly, or something needs to be compiled with one in order to work with the other. At every turn I came up against stuff that was known not to work. So in the end I have reluctantly decided that I must be congruent, and not try to pretend that Windows is Unix. It was a painful decision, but so far it has paid off.

Now, to get on with some development…