I've just about completed my first Ruby on Rails based application. Coding it was like a dream. I honestly enjoyed working with the framework and the speed at which I was able to put things together.

However, once I went to deploy it to another server that was running Apache I ran into problems. I spent two solid days trying to get things working and I finally gave up. The server was running Linux Fedora 3, Apache 2, and I was trying to get SSL working with it as well. I installed FastCGI with no apparent problems. However, when I tried to access the application itself the FastCGI process kept crashing. I tried just using WebRick but the SSL support for that is beyond me.

I ended up using Proxypass from the Apache instance on my Linux box to my Windows server that I already setup for development. I had to disable my SSL redirects that I had configured in the application because for some reason they caused endless looping of those requests. It is slow right now without FastCGI or mod_ruby but until I'm done testing that is were it will live. I'm hoping that one of those Ruby on Rails hosting companies will know better than me.

All and all the experience of using Ruby on Rails was great but the experience of deploying it to another server was a nightmare. My tolerance for pain is pretty high. I'm not sure how quickly RoR will be adopted by newbies if what I experienced was typical.