RailsInside reports on New Relic "lite", a new free version of New Relic RPM that provides Rails monitoring. The product provides information on throughput, response time as load increases and per-controller action time information. New Relic also has a fully-featured version (watch the Product Tour); and both versions are Supported for GlassFish Server! Arun says he is going to a deeper review of this and another product very soon; stay tuned.

Last week Kenai went beta, with the usual services in a development hub site plus an additional "connected" angle. Our GF CORBA project is already using its Hg repository but another very interesting angle is the technology mix.

Kenai acheived development agility with reliability by using a combination of our scripting (JRuby/Rails) and enterprise (GlassFish v2, MySQL, OpenSolaris) technologies. These combinations are beginning to pop all over and are one of the key targets of GlassFish, using JRuby (see Nick's Blog site), Groovy (see Glenn's GroovyBlogs), or others. Back to Kenai, check out Tim's Interview with Nick, and some Technical Details on Caching and in Testing/Performance Methodology. Also see Pictures from Austvik, Spotlight from Arun and Lenz's Technology Overview.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

The vast majority of Tomcat applications ran fin on GlassFish. Jan tell us that now even the ones using the Tomcat-style valves will run unmodified. Of at The ServerSide Pawan explains How to use OpenMQ with Mule ESB by configuring the Mule JMS connector. Added (by pelegri) - I've heard of a number of requests for this, please let us know if you use the combination so we can track OpenMQ adoption. LayeredTech announced free GlassFish hosting for Sun Startup Essentials™ Program participants. CrazyRails has a post on how to install JRuby on Rails on Mac, including GlassFish and MySQL setup. More GlassFish coverage is promised.

Dick has a detailed post on "LAMP stack on GlassFish" which really focused on Caucho's Quercus PHP runtime inside GlassFish to execute Wordpress (with MySQL as the back-end obviously). The post provides database setup details and prefers standalone WAR files (carying along Quercus). Sébastien focuses on Joomla on GlassFish but prefers the PHP/JavaBridge route even if it requires more configuration steps including a native PHP installation.

In JRuby on Rails land, Jacob has a two-part series on how to make the GlassFish jRubyOnRails runtime pooling more effective and the AI-logic available to other scripting technologies hosted in GlassFish as well.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Back in Sept'07 Arun wrote about Using GlassFish's JDBC connection Pooling in a Rails App; now Ikai@LinkedIn has an updated note that includes changes since then and presents the instructions from the perspective of a Rails developer. Ikai's note covers warbler, the MySQL Connection Adaptor and Other Code. Check out Ikai's writeup, and I hope we can tell you more about that particular use case!

Trying to catch up a bit on Ruby/Rails/JRuby related news...

Two new NetBeans 6.1 Ruby tutorials: Getting Started With Ruby and Rails and Using Java Libraries in Rails Applications. The last topic is one of the big benefits of JRuby, one example is this report of Calling into Sun's SSO and another is this Tutorial showing Invoking Java 2D Graphics. A recent adoption story is CSI's use of JRuby in a project on Infectious disease reporting and management. Slightly older is Nick's This Blog now Powered by GlassFish and JRuby.

Overall, very nice progress on the JRuby/Rails front. I believe the last set of formal releases were: Release of GlassFish Gem 0.3.0/0.3.1 (announcement and update), and JRuby Module in the Update Centers with JRuby 1.1.1. The interest continues to grow and it is moving closer to actual deployments; perhaps time to start a commercial support offering?

PS. Arun has a whole collection of applicable entries tagged JRuby.

JRuby 1.1.2 is released. They key features are reduced startup time, improved performance and 95 issues fixed since the previous release. Read how to Get Started with GlassFish Gem and deploy popular Rails applications using JRuby 1.1.2 and Gem.

Sun offers quite a number of training courses, and some of them are even free. Some I noticed this week:

Trond highlights two very interesting free Webinars next week with top speakers (tip): "Highly scalable solutions with MySQL and Memcached" (Wed) and "Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL" (Thu). Marina points to free Student Courses as part of the resources at the Student Portal. Arun and Daniel mention Sang's latest course on Ruby and Rails. Sang's Java Passion site has many good online courses using the GlassFish Server, including JavaEE, Web Services and EJB.

Sun has many other courses, sometimes it's just a bit hard to find them. For example, the site for online and in classroom courses offered by Sun is http://www.sun.com/training and many of these are related to GlassFish, but a Search for "glassfish" will yield only a few of those.

We are working to fix that last problem, and I try to capture courses I know at GlassFishForBusiness, but what we really need is a full-time librarian... ideally a super one, like Conan the Librarian.

Using JRuby (instead of Ruby) to develop your Rails applications allow you to leverage the power of Java libraries in Rails applications. Java 2D API is one such API that provides support for advanced 2D graphics and imaging. Jennifer has a good Writeup explaining image-filtering effects (negative, grayscale, brigthen, sharpen) using Java 2D API on an image.

The app runs using GlassFish v3 Gem but can be natively deployed on TP2 as well.

TP2 Docs provide a more comprehensive tutorial on how to get started with using Rails for the GlassFish v3 Application Server.

The web site for WorldxChange Communications NZ looks very good (they won the NZ Telecommunications Carrier of the Year 2007) and their Customer Bill View system is a JRuby Application running on GlassFish v2! The application came from an strategic emphasis in improving the customer experience and was developed very quickly, that influenced the choice of technologies. Check out Chris' Adoption Story and check the Questionnaire. The questionnaires for the Adoption Stories are always full of very interesting details; for example, WXC uses CentOS in production. Annecdotal data, but still, interesting.

Heard on the blogosphere ...

Teflon Ted's blog entry Rails Doesn't Scale is betting on JRuby and GlassFish. It says: "Personally my money is on JRuby (and Glassfish) for the long haul; if you haven't checked out Glassfish yet, you're doing yourself a disservice!."

Have you checked out GlassFish v3 gem for JRuby ?

It is now hosted on RubyForge and can be easily installed using "gem install glassfish". Read more details here.

Christmas in February! It took a bit longer than I expected but the GlassFish v3 M2 is now available. This release supports the Java Web Container (no JSF so far) and JRuby on Rails. Also supported are multiple HTTP listeners and Virtual Servers. Have fun! Downloads and Available Commands.

JRuby 1.1 RC2 is Now Available. Quoting from the relase, changes include: • 260 issues resolved since JRuby 1.1RC1 • Large IO refactoring • Memory improvements for JIT'd methods

The team is soliciting feedback to assess if it can move from a Release Candidate to a final release.