I think in this instance, "ruby" is more accurate. they didn't say "it is an exclusive property of rails", just that Rails has it, which is true. It's more true than saying Ruby has it.
Yeah, but setting up a rails or django server/hosting environment for development is a lot more difficult than a comparable php setup; tools like MAMP, XAMP, et al make it fairly trivial to get going quickly.
XAMPP/MAMP and others like it seem like they make life easier until you hit a point where you realize that they are seriously leaky implementations. I wish I had time to write in detail about this (because I also hate when people make claims like this without showing examples); however, I have a feeling that the people that would benefit the most won't care anyway.
Don't these distros still put php.ini in c:\windows?
You need mysql-python, which depends on some header from mysql-client-dev, which requires some compiling or package, then there's PIL, virtualenv, uwsgi and shit.
Oh wait, you don't have pip on most distros by default. You need to apt-get or wget that.
For smaller projects, sure, this is great. The moment you need to test your site with the the Apache rewrite_module or another web servers flavor of it is the moment this becomes useless.
Yeah but if you need that functionality you can take the hour to set up a localhost install of apache with whatever stuff you need. This is for rapid debugging and people just learning.
Exactly, and I like built in servers because it's easy to start messing with stuff until I find I need something bigger (and I often don't until it's time to actually think about deploying stuff). I can't even think of the number of times I had an idea, started installing a server to work on and stopped halfway through.
I like it is like in the rails/django world