Rails newbie here!

I've been learning ruby recently and I'm now trying to set up a rails
project. I'm running on a Windows 2008 R2 server with IIS7.5. I've beens
searching for the appropriate ISAPI filter and other tools to run ruby
on IIS. I am surprised (and disappointed) to see that most references
date back to at least 2007. The handful of later references seem to have
links back to software that is either no longer available (e.g
RubyForIIS, site parked) or outdated.

The most recent code I came across was something called Helicon Zoo, but
even this has outdated ruby software (1.8 or 1.9) and does not detect
that already have ruby 1.9.3 and rails 3 installed.

Has Rails development on IIS stalled? Will I have to use Apache?

Hello.
Actually Helicon Zoo installs Ruby 1.9.3 and supports the latest Rails
3.1. In case of Zoo no Apache is needed at all. It runs on IIS. Please
describe the steps you did and what actually failed.
Thank you.

Slava Shynkarenko wrote in post #1035457:
> Hello.
> Actually Helicon Zoo installs Ruby 1.9.3 and supports the latest Rails
> 3.1. In case of Zoo no Apache is needed at all. It runs on IIS. Please
> describe the steps you did and what actually failed.
> Thank you.

I already had Ruby 1.9.3 downloaded and installed from the ruby website
and the server already has a vanilla IIS 7.5 installed. I created a new
site in IIS with a new folder in c:\inetpub. I then installed Rails
using gem as per the rubyonrails.org website:

gem install rails

rails new c:\inetpub\scansafe

There no mention here as to whether this installs an ISAPI filter or
anything, but it does say to follow the instructions on localhost port
3000. The last command above produced several lines of output. I got an
'exist' then 'create README' and then:

C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thor-0.14.6/lib/thor/actions/create_file.rb:
63:in `initialize': Permission denied - c:/inetpub/scansafe/README
(Errno::EACCE
S)

There is absolutely no reason for permission denied as I myself created
the directory and have full permissions to it. My account is also in the
local administrators group. I also tried c:/inetpub/scansafe with the
same result.

I used Google to find out more and discovered that ruby on rails is
apparently meant to be set up on Apache not IIS. I found some outdated
libraries as noted in my opening comment and finally came across Helicon
Zoo which I downloaded and tried to follow the procedure on the website.
I added the zoo feed and proceeded to select install options.

The rather weird zoo installer correctly identifies that I have
strawberry perl 5.12 installed but does not recognize that I have ruby
1.9.3 or rails 3 already installed. It only lists ruby 1.8 and 1.9 (not
1.9.3), although the banner on the zoo website suggest that 1.9.2 is
supported. Likewise it says rails 3, but not 3.1.3. Since I didn't want
to run the risk of installing older versions over newer ones or
disrupting the installation that I already have I aborted the install.
I'm not really sure where to go from here. I'm considering going back to
perl but, if its still supported and actively being developped on IIS, I
would rather move forward with ruby and rails.