Dynamic Languages support in GlassFish v3 Prelude

By now most of you might already know that  GlassFish v3 Prelude is  released! GlassFish v3 Prelude brings not only JavaEE support but also brings in support for Dynamic Languages based platforms, such as Rails, Grails and also tested to work for Scala/Lift, PHP (Quecus, Java-PHP bridge). 

Read Jerome's post on GlassFish v3 key architectural points that enables pluggable containers.




Following dynamic languages based frameworks are supported on GlassFish v3 Prelude:

JRuby on Rails

Ruby on Rails applications are supported in the pure native form using JRuby runtime. There is Rails container in GlassFish v3 that deploys and passes on the request and response to Rails using Grizzly. Since Rails is single threaded, there is JRuby runtime pool, which can be configured for scaling well.

There is also GlassFish Ruby gem. The GlassFish gem is based on GlassFish v3 nucleus, this means you are running/testing your Rails applications against the same GlassFish server bits. Read here on how to use GlassFish gem.

Read here for more details on how JRuby on Rails works and key features.

Also note that JRuby and Rails deployment on Glassfish v3 Prelude is commercially supported by Sun.

Groovy on Grails

GlassFish v3 Prelude Update Center provides Grails package which is Grails 1.0.3 plus value additions from GlassFish. Here are some key points:

• Development and deployment on the same server
• grails run-app runs GlassFish v3 Prelude in embedded mode
•  Efficient packaging and deployment
• grails shared-war creates a smaller and efficient grails application
• Hot deployment without OOM/PermGen issue 
• Deploying war file created with 'grails war' command has certain issues with with respect to locks in groovy and HSQLDB's issue. These issues cause OOM due to lack of PermGen space on multiple redeployments.
• grails shared-war minimizes it in orders of magnitude

See Getting Started guide and don't miss Alexis  screencast From Zero to Grails in 5 minutes with GlassFish v3 Prelude.

PHP

Quercus (Caucho)

• Open Source (GPL) PHP 5 implementation in Java
• WAR packaging
• WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Joomla

PHP/Java Bridge

• Open Source (LGPL)
• XML based network protocol for native PHP
• Faster, easier than JNI
• Java native threads used for concurrent requests
• PHP and JSP session sharing

Scala/Lift

• Lifts apps packaged as WAR
• asadmin deploy liftApp.war
• For details on developing and deploying Lift applications on GlassFish v3, see here

Get GlassFish v3 Prelude and start developing applications on it. As always let us know what you think through the mailing list or report an issue on the issue tracker.