IIS Deployment

Hello All,

I have a Ruby on Rails codebase that is only partially completed. Due
to circumstances beyond my control, the production server must be IIS,
and there is absolutely no way to change this. Deployment is
currently due in mid August, basically two months away. My question
is this. What are the chances the IronRuby project will be ready to
handle something like this at that point in time? Should I basically
take what we have and rewrite it in something like ASP.NET MVC?

I’ve spent sometime working and thinking about ways to make this
happen. My approach, which is probably terrible, was to take the
Web.Routing assembly in a regular ASP.NET application, create a
catch-all route and pass all the information to the dispatch.rb file.
Granted, I haven’t actually got this to work, and this is probably a
horrible way to do this.

In any case, with deployment two months away, I need to make the
decision now to stick with Rails, or make the switch over…

Sincerely,
Josh

I think august is cutting it a little close. I have no idea how much
time
you’ve already spent on it, so dunno if a rewrite in a diff technology
is
the way to go. And you can deploy RoR to IIS. If you want I can send you
a
white paper. THe idea is that you forward all the requests to a mongrel.
I haven’t had much luck with the FastCGI that the IIS team provides. It
just
doesn’t want to do it for me. But using mongrels/thin does work for me.

When IronRuby then comes into its own you can always switch to run that
app
on IronRuby \

my 2c.

Cheers
Ivan

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 8:49 AM, Josh C. [email protected]

Not sure which version of IIS you are running, but Mike Volodarsky, a
former
IIS Team Member, has a guide to running RoR on IIS on his blog:

.
HTH!
Joe

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Ivan Porto C.
[email protected]

Thank you both for your replies. There’s only about 40 man-hours in
the project so far, so it is possible (though unpreferable) to do a
rewrite in MVC.

I have looked at the papers on running Rails on IIS using both mongrel
and fast-cgi, but unfortunately, both of these are unfeasible. The
deployment is going to be a sub-site for a public university.
Originally, it didn’t seem like it would be a problem to have a linux
server setup, but now things are being locked down tight, so
basically, all I’m going to have access to is x-copy deployment (and a
database script that can be run). So I won’t have any access to the
server, and the servers guys have absolutely no interest in supporting
anything they don’t already support. So basically, IIS and SQL Server
is what I get.

I had already been looking at the IronRuby project, so I thought I
would go ahead and ask.

Thanks again,

Sincerely,
Josh

Good luck Josh. If you’re going to go with MVC make sure they have
ASP.NET3.5 Framework installed.
-Joe

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Josh C. [email protected]