Ruby on Rails on Windows in production

Windows environment has been traditionally treated as no-way for Ruby developers, especially when it comes to production. In the following article I will show how easy and efficient it could be setting up your Ruby environment in Windows for both development and production purposes using Helicon Zoo. And performance tests at the end of the article will show whether Windows system can be treated seriously as a production environment.

This article covers following topics:

  • Installing development environment.
  • Writing a simple application.
  • Preparing your application for deployment.
  • Deploying the application to the production server.
  • Compare performance with Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.5 and Ubuntu Linux with Apache and Nginx.

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Posted in Helicon Zoo | Tagged | 1 Comment

Installing OSQA on Windows in production

This is a very simple step by step guide to install OSQA on Windows server in production. This guide is applicable to IIS 7+ based servers, which include Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Latter two should not be used for production solutions though. Please follow these steps: Continue reading →

Posted in Helicon Zoo | Tagged | 3 Comments

Installing Redmine on Windows in production

This is a very simple step by step guide to install Redmine on Windows server in production. This guide is applicable to IIS 7+ based servers, which include Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, Windows 2012, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Latter two are not intended to be used for production solutions. Please follow these steps:

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Posted in Helicon Zoo | Tagged | 6 Comments

Node.js on Windows (with performance tests)

In this article we are going to address basic question which might occur in minds of green web-programmers and those who is going to dive into Node.js learning, namely:

  • how to install Node.js developer environment of your PC;
  • how to code;
  • how to debug;
  • how to deploy what you’ve done on remote server.

And the performance tests at the end of the article will try answer a reasonable question “Why would I need to learn Node.js.”
So, let’s start…

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Running Django on Windows (with performance tests)

Django is a trendy Python-based framework for web applications. Its ever-growing popularity owes to availability of quick development tools, inbuilt administrative interface and high operation speed. Unfortunately, until now there was no easy tried-and-true way to deploy and run Django-apps on Microsoft IIS web-servers. Here we introduce Helicon Zoo – a solution to run popular web-frameworks and applications with Microsoft IIS. It bases on Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI) technology to deploy apps. WebPI also handles different dependencies and takes care of installation of necessary components, such as Python, IIS, various database drivers and modules. And, of course, Helicon Zoo itself which sticks it all to Microsoft IIS 7+.

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Posted in Helicon Zoo | Tagged | 10 Comments

Running Django, Rails and Mojolicious on Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7

Recently released  Helicon Zoo is a repository of popular web frameworks for Microsoft IIS. It makes installing and running Django, Ruby on Rails and Mojolicious on Windows Servers a piece of cake.

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Сounting downloads from your site

If you have some downloadable content on your site (installation packages), you’ll probably want to monitor the statistics of downloads. But the popular Google Analytics system cannot count that as it is working only inside html-pages. Another option is analyzing server logs, but that’s something you’ll probably choose last of all… That’s why we are offering rather a simple way of counting downloads with Helicon Ape.

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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged | 2 Comments

Make your websites work faster

In April 2010 Google announced, that speed of a web site will be considered as an aspect of web search ranking. This means that web site creators and webmasters need to optimize their websites. What is the best way to do that? What if web developers are out of reach? What if changing the code is not an option? We can offer several simple and fast solutions for improving your web site performance using Helicon Ape. To start with you need to download Helicon Ape and install it on your Windows server. Native Helicon Ape Manager allows you to change your web server setting using .htaccess text files. Continue reading →

Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged | 1 Comment

Exploding myths about mod_rewrite. Part 2.

This article is the anticipated sequel of “Exploding myths about mod_rewrite. Part 1” published more than a year ago. In this two-volume work (which may well become a three-volume one soon) we try to thoroughly explain each tiny issue/option of Helicon Ape mod_rewrite (also true for Apache) to give you all the knowledge necessary to master it in its full. Part 2 devotes itself to contexts processing order.
So, let’s start the story…

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Posted in ISAPI_Rewrite | Tagged | 11 Comments

IIS reverse proxy and load balancer with web admin panel

Since build 3.0.0.50 Helicon Ape offers a web interface for the load balancer.

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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged | 1 Comment