JRuby brings Rails applications to Glassfish

by Rob Thornton on Nov 20, 2006 |

It is now possible to deploy Ruby on Rails applications on Glassfish. Utilizing JRuby and its growing support for Rails, Glassfish can now be used as a production platform, allowing a more robust and scalable deployment platform.

Previously, Rails applications were deployed using multiple processes of Mongrel, which required managing all of them, and handling zombie processes. Now, Takai Naoto has detailed the steps to deploying a JRuby on Rails application in Glassfish. Charles Nutter, one of the JRuby leads, describes the benefits of this approach:

The potential here should be obvious. GlassFish, like other Java EE application servers, is extremely good at scaling up many concurrent requests across many independent applications; so good that many organizations deploy only a single appserver-per-machine and stuff it full of applications to serve. That means a single server, a single process to manage. GlassFish also supports clustering, which means you'll be able to hit the deploy button once and have your n-server cluster instantly start serving up Rails. But there's one last area that trumps all the rest:

That single app server can handle as many concurrent requests across as many independent Rails apps as you desire, scaling them across all the CPU cores you can throw at it.

There are some drawbacks to this solution, namely the deployment process. Robert Cooper describes how this loses all the benefits of WAR packaging. He points out that the Java tools are very good and while it is good to have Rails applications running in Glassfish, it should be done in such a way to leverage the existing tools.

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Community comments

WAR-based deployment *will* happen by Charles Nutter Posted

A bit like PHP in Oracle Application Server by paul browne Posted

New screencast showing first JRuby app using NetBeans by Arun Gupta Posted

WAR-based deployment *will* happen by Charles Nutter

What Cooper fails to understand is that WAR-based deployment *is* the ultimate goal. We've been looking at the problem a lot lately, and by my estimation no Rails appserver deployment model will be complete until there's support for bundling your entire app as a WAR file and deploying it like a standard Java webapp. It may not be here today...but we like to think we're moving pretty quickly. It will be here "tomorrow".

A bit like PHP in Oracle Application Server by paul browne

JRuby in Glassfish is a bit like PHP in Oracle Application Server. Both allow you to use a non-Java language for rapid Web development, while having a Java 'core' to your application to ensure maintainability.

Paul , Technology in Plain English

New screencast showing first JRuby app using NetBeans by Arun Gupta

I released a screencast this morning that shows how you develop your first JRuby app using NetBeans IDE at:

blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/screencast_web6_f...

This entry also shows how the Rails app can be deployed as WAR on GlassFish.