Any Luck with Ruby on Rails?

ruby on rails

[miyagi]

I have had the opportunity to play with Ruby on Rails over the past few weeks. While things work great on my Mac, I have failed miserably at getting anything up and running on a live hosted account.

I tried to install Typo a few weeks ago and it did not work. I also tried Instiki and it worked great on my Mac but not on my host. My web host has rails installed but cannot help at all.

Am I better off staying with PHP? Or do I just need to find the right web host?

[webdoctor]

Am I better off staying with PHP?

What exactly do you want to do - with PHP or Ruby on Rails?

Or do I just need to find the right web host?

Finding the right host is always a good start...

Seriously, what are you looking to accomplish? Is this a new project? Are you the only developer? Are you actually looking for a list of specific features?

[miyagi]

Basically, I'm looking to build a few web applications to become subscription-based services - like what 37 signals is doing, sort of. I was very impressed with the rails video, but now I am finding that I don't even really use the scaffolding that it so nicely illustrates..

I've got several database-driven application ideas that would work nicely with the ajax helpers rails offers.. though i have a bit more php experience i have been enjoying the development of my applications more than recent php work i have done.

The web host I use offers ruby on rails but doesn't do much with it and i have not been able to get it to work properly. It lets you create rails projects but they don't offer Lighttpd, and I read that FastCGI doesn't work well with Apache. And I have not been able to get any web server running, even the simple Instiki setup.