JRuby and Rails on GlassFish v3 Prelude - An Overview

GlassFish v3 Prelude supports deployment of Rails applications and also other dynamic language based frameworks such as Grails, which is based on groovy language.

The support for dynamic languages based frameworks on GlassFish v3 comes through it's modular and extensible architecture and support for pluggable Containers. Rails and Grails are just different Container which are also OSGi bundles that get plugged in to GlassFish v3. Read on the overview of GlassFish v3 Prelude architecture in Jerome's blog.

The architecture diagram below shows how support for Ruby on Rails applications is realized in side GlassFish v3 Prelude

 

Key features

• Rails application deployment - natural Rails way, no packaging
• asadmin deploy myRailsApp/
• Choice to deploy as WAR also
• JRuby -S install warbler
• warble
• asadmin deploy myRailsApp.war
• Needs JRuby runtime to run the Rails application
• Install JRuby runtime and ready-to-go set of gems (Rails, JDBC-MySQL adapter, warbler) from GlassFish v3 Update Center
• glassfish-install/bin/updateool



• The simply deploy your Rails application on GlassFish
• asadmin deploy myRailsApp/
• If you have your own JRuby installation with the set of required gems then you need to tell GlassFish where it is available. you can chose to do one of the following
• java -Djruby.home=/tools/jruby-1.1.5 modules/glassfish.jar
• Edit domain.xml (glassfish-install/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml) and add
• <jvm-options>-Djruby.home=/tools/jruby-1.1.5</jvm-options>
• Access to GlassFish v3 JavaEE features
• JDBC connection pool
• See Arun's blog 
• Host your JavaEE, Grails, JRuby/Rails applications side by side
• Easier, scalable deployment
• Rails is single threaded. GlassFish keeps JRuby runtimes in a pool, which can be configured based on the available resources to scale better
• Read here on how to configure JRuby runtime pool
• NetBeans 6.5 RC2 supports development, deployment and debugging of Rails applications on GlassFish v3 Prelude

Now, go and get GlassFish v3 Prelude and start developing, deploying your Rails applications on it:-) You may like to bookmark JRuby GlassFish wiki  for details and if you have questions let us know through the mailing list or report an issue on the issue tracker.