In several years I am using my workstation as development environment. I think that most of web developers use their workstation for running their servers, Apache, Tomcat, Mongrel etc. I have been working in a company that have a Unix development server in another city, with the document root folder share with samba. I am still developing on my Windows PC because to use IDE like Eclipse PDT and RubyMine requires a fast access to the file system and because I want to try things on my own without bothering with helpdesk tickets and stuff like that. I prefer to run my tools, install/uninstall software easily.
The main problem is that I am forced to use Windows and I cannot develop on a simialr environment to Unix. For instance on production we have Passenger, in Windows Passenger cannot be used and since I have a shared environment, PHP/Rails, in development I have Rails URLs with http://localhost:3000/ and for PHP just http://localhost, on the production I just have http://domain.com/apps for Rails and http://domain.com/
So do you run your developemnt server in your workstation or on a remote server?
I would like to have a confirmation that my practice is the most adopted. Thanks.
A VM on my workstation (which has the advantage that it goes anywhere my workstation goes and I don’t need to worry about bandwidth when I’m at a remote site)