Web Development Box - Power or Price?

[Acoustica]

Evening everyone!

I'm a long time web designer (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and I'm eager to expand my horizons by starting to develop web applications. I've chosen Ruby on Rails as my framework of choice because I've seen all the great things that can be done with it. Here's my question:

I'm currently on a AlBook Rev B and I'm looking to upgrade within the next 6/7 months or so (the time inbetween learning about Ruby/MySQL/LightTPD) and I want a new development box. I'm wondering if I should go for a solid Intel iMac or save up and purchase the yet to be released Intel PowerMac? My needs are pretty simple:

• Web Application Development
• Application Testing
• Local Web Server/Database

Will an iMac suit me fine for this or would I really benefit from a Pro box? The only added benefit to getting the iMac would be that I would have two 20-inch displays as I already have a monitor. Thanks for your insight/suggestions!

 

[motherduce]

Intel iMac or iMac G5 would be plenty for what you are doing, and great for multiple other projects you may want to work on (home photos/video, etc).

I'd go for a refurb iMac G5 20" if that's what you're looking for - around $1100 on Apple Store

 

[Towel]

I do some bioinformatics web development in HTML and Perl, and am exploring Ruby. For development and testing, there's really no reason you can't get started on your PBG4. None of the tools are particularly resource-intensive to use by themselves (unless you're using them through a gargantuan web-dev suite). For the future, an iMac should be just fine. If you need a quad-core Conroe to develop your web app, your clients might have trouble finding a hosting service that can properly run it. Also, there are reports that Perl for Darwin/x86 is substantially faster than for Darwin/PPC, and the same may be true of Ruby.

Note that the version of Ruby included with OS X is improperly configured for using Rails. You can learn the language, but to develop in Rails you need to reinstall Ruby - details and instructions are in the "Agile" Rails book and around the web.