Jacob Kessler's Blog: A newbie's rantings on Glassfish scripting, AI, and other things

It's another late blog post, but with good reason this time!

 Glassfish gem 0.9.0 is finally released. you can get it now with the command

gem install glassfish

Assuming that you've already got Ruby or JRuby installed. If you don't, you probably don't care at all. If you want to, you can also visit it on Rubyforge.

Now, what does Glassfish gem get you? Briefly, it gives you everything from glassfish v3 prelude in a small, easy-to-use package. It's a production-quality application server with all of the features that I've been talking about here: auto-runtime configuration, merb/rack support, application auto-detection, etc. It's even got an intelligent toaster included, though sticking bread into your computer still isn't reccommended.

"Great!", you say. "How do I use it?". Using it for a Rails or Merb app is extremely simple: just run the command "glassfish" (or, jruby -S glassfish if the jruby/bin directory isn't in your path) from the root directory of your app, and gem figures out the rest for you (that's where the intelligent toaster comes in). Seconds later, you'll have your app running happily at localhost:3000.

"But I want to run my app on port 80!" you say. Calm down, calm down. You just need to give it the --port 80 option, and you can run it on whatever port you want to. Similarly, you can give it whatever context root you want, though by default it runs at /

"What about the runtime pool? I don't want to deal with how many instances of Rails are running until Rails 2.2 is finally released!" you say. Don't worry, we've thought of that too. Although gem defaults to only a single runtime, you can give it --runtimes-min, --runtimes-max, and --runtimes to set the minimum, maximum, and initial runtimes, and the auto-configuring runtime pool will set off to manage your runtimes. It's a good thing it does, too. Glassfish gem, like v3, is built on Grizzly, and if you thought that herding mongrel packs was difficult, imagine what a pack of grizzlies would be like. More powerful, faster, and with more teeth, for one ;-). Of course, if you're running a thread-safe framework like Merb or Rails 2.2, Glassfish will take that into account and you'll only have one instance of your framework around, reducing your memory footprint.

 A summary of all of the gem configuration options can be seen with glassfish -h. Go out and play with it today!

For a more formal description, check out Vivek's blog. Remember to send your feedback to the forum and report issues at the issue tracker.