It seems every few months some new technology pops up in the realm of web development that everybody claims is better, cheaper, or faster. Obviously, the everybody is largely comprised of the current advocates of the technology and not the everybody in the world, but it sometimes just takes a few people making a lot of noise to get your attention.

Plexus Web Creations was a Microsoft shop until last year thanks to the noise created by the community of Ruby on Rails developers. We found that Ruby on Rails was quicker, cheaper, faster and much more enjoyable to work in compared to our previous technologies of .NET and classic ASP (see, even I can make noise and be an everybody).

After switching to Rails as our development platform, our requirements for an operating system changed. We were no longer required to use Windows. My initial jump was to a dual booting Debian/XP machine that I only booted into Windows when maintaining old code. After a few months Apple released the MacBook and I just had to have one. I was stuck with a shiny new MacBook on my desk that just played my iTunes playlist while I worked on my old machine in Windows. As much as I would like to sell every old client on new technology I realize that the cost actually is not cheaper for them since we have to basically redo what is already working fine.

In an effort to satisfy my desire to use my MacBook and maintain old sites I decided to try Terminal Services. This is a workable solution only if you don't mind typing and waiting five minutes for your text to appear. I was happy to subject myself to this punishment though until I realized how much time I was losing and realized since the customer can't pay for network latency I must find a better alternative. On a whim, I tried the demo from Parallels, a company that makes a virtual machine for Apple machines. I was very impressed with the interface and ease of setup. In thirty five minutes I was running XP within OS X. Even more impressive was the performance. I installed Visual Studio .NET and hammered out some code and was amazed at how much it felt like I was on a real machine.

I think web development is all about the right tool at the right time. If you prefer to have an Apple but need to help your customer no matter what the platform grab a copy of Parallels Desktop for the Mac.