Has anyone tried using Rails (or PHP or whatever) on IIS lately? There
is a FastCGI extention for IIS 5.1 and 6.0 [1], backported from IIS7 if
I understand correctly. I’m curious if anyone thinks this would work in
production and give Rails a decent inroad for IIS-based shops. It seems
to perform [2] but I would like some verification from the community at
large before I mention the “R” word at work again. 
[1] http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1521
[2]
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScreencastHowToIIS7AndPHPWithFastCGI.aspx
I’ve done tons of work with Rails on IIS. The bottom line is that it’s
not
worth it right now, as FastCGI is not a good, scalable way of deploying
Rails. It works ok for a single application, but things start to get
messy
with multiple apps
The best aproach is to deploy Mongrel on the Windows machine and then
use
Apache + mod_proxy_balancer. I’ve posted lots of stuff on this before.
Various setups for Windows-based deployments are also outlined in the
next
beta release of Deploying Rails Applications. (
Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers). In that book, I explain how
to
graft Rails apps onto an existing IIS server so you can share
certificates
or even move the apps to a Linux box or other machines so you can
actually
scale upwards.
If you want to talk specifics, don’t hesitated to contact me off-list.
I’d
be glad to share information with you.