So, having tried various solutions involving fastcgi and url rewrite which I could not get to work on IIS 7.5 under Windows 7 I found http://www.helicontech.com/zoo . I’ve seen the people behind it on various other posts on msdn etc so there is some history of them working on IIS, fastcgi and url rewrite. In fact I think they have had a url rewrite product available for a number of years.

* Install Rails

1) Install the Web Platform Installer from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
2) Add http://www.helicontech.com/zoo/feed as a new feed
3) From the zoo tab select Blank Ruby on Rails Rails project and Ruby1.8 and click the install button. It will also install other dependencies.
4) When installing the blank project it will pop up and ask you where to put it along with other required details like the name. Make a note of where the project lives since we need a couple of files from it.
5) From the blank rails project we need the web.config files in the projects root and public directories.  Place these in the same place in your rails project directories.  To use Ruby1.9 we need to replace ruby.1.9.pipe in the web.config in the projects root directory with ruby.1.8.pipe. You may also have to add the path to ruby’s bin directory to your environment variables - C:\Ruby18\bin or C:\Ruby19\bin
6) Ensure that the projects directories are writeable by the IIS_IUSRS user.
7) Add the project to IIS with the project path pointing to the rails projects root directory (not public like you would with a rails project under apache).

* Install Git

This is used for version control and can be found on http://git-scm.com/ Install the version marked ‘Full installer for official Git for Windows 1.7.8′ or similar (version name might be different).

* Install required gems (libxml and imagemagick specific instructions)

There are various 3rd party dependencies that the gems that MethodBox requires including imagemagick (ie. rmagick) and libxml-ruby. On windows this requires a little bit of user intervention during the install process. Go to http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php?ImageMagick=uteqfietdab37ghqrvfuvoul55#windows and download http://www.imagemagick.org/download/binaries/ImageMagick-6.7.3-7-Q16-windows-dll.exe
Double click and go through the installer, selecting to install C and C++ header files and libraries from the additional options page
add environment variable CPATH=\path\to\imagemagick\include and LIBRARY_PATH=\path\to\imagemagick\lib

There is a high chance that the libxml-2.2.dll needed for libxml-ruby is not present in the lib folder and will pop up an error.  The dll can be found in C:\Ruby18\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\libxml-ruby-2.2.0-x86-mingw32\lib\libs\  Copy the libxml, iconv and zlib dlls and put in the C:\Ruby18\bin folder.

Note: If you are not using mysql then comment any mysql gem out of the Gemfile. Otherwise the system may complain about libmysql.dll missing.  If you are using mysql you need to copy the dll from the mysql/bin folder to the ruby lib folder.

* SQL server and rails

1) Find out your SQL server details. If your SQL server instance has not been allowed through the firewall then you need to find out its details: open up the sqlserver management console (which you can install along with sqlserver express via the Web Platform Installer - I recommend this way, downloading on its own and installing does not work correctly) and look at your db details.
2) Set up a Data Source Name (DSN) for your ODBC connection.  This is not that well documented so you need to find the C:\Windows\sysWOW64 directory and start the odbcad32 programme.  Then you add a system DSN for your instance of sqlserver.
3) Set up your rails projects database.yml as normal with the following records:

adapter: sqlserver
mode: odbc
dsn: sqlserverapp-dsn (the one you created earlier)
username: user
password: secret
host: localhost (or whatever)

Double click and go through the installer, selecting to install C and C++ header files and libraries from the additional options page (this is very important)

Then add environmant variable CPATH=\path\to\imagemagick\include and LIBRARY_PATH=\path\to\imagemagick\lib

You can then ‘gem install rmagick’ and it will build it using the native image magick libraries.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"

Then update the packages available:

sudo apt-get update

Then you can install Sun’s (Oracles?) Java

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

You can see the complete file here but below is a quick synopsis of the changes:

added a boolean to keep track of whether you want a different tooltip than the tab title:

this.differentTooltip = true;

if this isn’t the behaviour you wanted then that’s ok:

if (!this.differentTooltip) {
t.headingText = t.div.title;
}


however, if the tooltip is to be different then make sure the
link for the tab is correct:

if (this.differentTooltip) {
DOM_a.title = t.tooltipText;
} else {
DOM_a.title = t.headingText;
}


for (x in array){

...some code

}

I was confused why it seemed to have lots more members than I had put in with contents that seemed to be functions.  So I used console.log and firebug to print out the array members and saw that they were the methods you could call on an array object.

A quick google revealed that (see here)

using for…in on arrays when using Prototype will enumerate all extended methods as well, such as those coming from the Enumerable module, and those Prototype puts in the Array namespace

and that the best (only?) way to do it in Prototype is

myArray.each(function(item) {

// Your code working on item here…

});

It’s all sorted now!

/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/Rcmd: line 62: exec: Rserve: not found

Compiling from source using the download from http://rosuda.org/Rserve/ never seems to work with all sorts of C related horror.

However, the Rserve component actually was installed but it looks like the paths/links were not quite right.  Typing this:

R CMD /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library/Rserve/libs/x86_64/Rserve.so

Got everything up and running. Doing this:

cp /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library/Rserve/libs/x86_64/Rserve-bin.so /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/Rserve

fixes it a bit more permanently

Importing a mysql dumpfile results in “ERROR 1153 (08S01) at line 265: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes”

Errm.

Log in to a mysql console,

enter the magic commands:

set global net_buffer_length=1000000;

set global max_allowed_packet=1000000000;

Modify your import to include the command:

–max_allowed_packet=100M

so you have something like

mysql –max_allowed_packet=100M -u user -p db_name < dump.sql

Try again

Your mileage may vary ( do they say kilometerage elsewhere?) so increase the allowed sizes if you have to.

class ActionController::Request
def relative_url_root
@@relative_url_root ||= case
when @env[”RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT”]
@env[”RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT”]
when server_software == ‘apache’
@env[”SCRIPT_NAME”].to_s.sub(/\/dispatch\.(fcgi|rb|cgi)$/, ”)
else
”
end
end
end

Based on bug reported here: http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?pid=73991#p73991.

It all seems to work fine now.

Add this to your model:

def to_param
"#{id}-#{title.downcase.gsub(/[^[:alnum:]]/,'-')}".gsub(/-{2,}/,'-')
end

Where title is whatever you want to appear after the id and you will get URLs like

www.somesite.com/people/1-Ian

More info from here