My brother has an entrepreneurial idea up his sleeve. He has commissioned me to produce it. It's a presents list. Its not original, but it doesn't need to be so long as by our combined effort we can make something peeps prefer to use and that doesn't cost us much to get up and running. If it doesn't work then tant pis; we'll do another 10 projects and maybe one of them will work.
RoR is the obvious solution since I've already done a project in Ruby, as a sub-contractor to Weight-Watchers (I had my choice of tools; WW had no role to play in choosing Ruby). If one of our projects takes off then we expect to re-write to Python for performance and internationalization purposes. Obviously a speedy Ruby virtual machine and UTF-8 support would address such needs, but in the time-scales we are expecting neither would be mature in time.
But I have never programmed against Rails, I've only heard of it. So this diary, I hope, will be of use to those also trying to crack the Rails nut.
Now a confession : I've already set myself up on Windows XP (that's not the confession), with Ruby 1.8.4 and Postgres 8.x. I had trouble installing Postgres, and I very much regret not noting the troubles and their solutions; my problems were general and yet I'm not aware of anyone having documented them. I extensively used Google Groups to sort me out. This diary isn't about Postgres, so I won't dwell too much on that subject except to say that I chose it over mySql as mySql is a can of worms - talking from bitter experience of its inconsistencies - while Postgres appears to be reasonably close to a true commercial database in features and support (ie. Interbase/Oracle etc) without the inconsistencies.
