A newer GlassFish V3 gem for JRuby and its known limitations

It has been a while since a new version of the GlassFish V3 gem for JRuby was last released. Since I have picked up the effort of maintaining this gem from Jerome, thought I would start by releasing a version based on the latest GlassFish V3 bits. Additionally I have made one change to the gem, by creating 2 Rails instances where only one was being created before.

Since we are targeting this gem to be used in the development environment, the gem should at a minimum provide for the functionalities that Webrick provides. Below I have listed out the limitations of the gem in the curent form. I would be working on improving the gem to fix these issues.

• The gem starts up by default on port 8080 and the only way to change the port is by manually editing the port entry in domain.xml. There should be support for --port option to provide a port to the gem.
• If the default port is being used, then the gem should look for the sequential port that could be used to start up.
• Requests made to the process launched using

      jruby -S glassfish_rails  

  are not being queued up. Hence if there is no rails instance available to satisfy the request, then the next request is returned with a blank page. This has already been reported by the users with the earlier gem.
• Creating rails instances to be pooled is a time consuming process. Based on tests on my Macbook pro, found the following when using JRuby 1.0.3
  • 1 rails instance takes 8-9secs,
  • 2 rails instance 10-11secs,
  • 3 rails instance 12-13secs,
  • 4 rails instance 14-16secs,
  • 5 rails instance 16-18secs,
  We could use the Goldspike approach, where we start with a minimum number of pool instances and then grow based on demand. In this case we would need to provide means to the user to set/change these values