The Rails folks have achieved great traction by creating a system that’s extremely easy to install and use. Continuing this trend, there’s now Instant Rails:

Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.

This initial release of Instant Rails is for Windows, but there are plans for ports to Linux, BSD, and OSX.

Instant rails supports both Webrick and Apache+SCGI– I believe the latter gives better overall performance. Both allow you to make changes to your models, views, and controllers without restarting any services.

The whole package, including language runtime, web server, database service, and web framework, is less than 38 MB. For good measure, you also get PHP and MySQLAdmin, a PHP based MySQL administration tool.

This is a great challenge to Microsoft– the .NET runtime alone is over 22MB, never mind IIS and SQL Server, and forces you to reboot your machine to complete the installation.

I should note that I had better luck with the preview5 edition than the preview7 edition. With the latter I could start the WEBrick but not the SCGI version of the server.