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.

Updates to two popular GlassFish-based bundles. The GF v3 Gem now has a a Bug Fix Update (v0.1.1); Pramod also includes plans for v0.1.2. The second is Liferay 4.4.1, also mostly bug fixes.

I enjoy data mining, so I poked around a bit at the download stats. The GF-based Liferay bundles have been increasing, from 5.4% in 4.3.0 to 15.1% in 4.4.1. And, since JBoss Portal 2.6.4 released the exact same day as Liferay 4.4.1, a comparison between the two was easy: 3778 for Liferay and 1053 for JBoss Portal.

The GlassFish (v3) Gem (older TA entries) has moved and it now lives at RubyForge.

Arun gives Details on the Gem and the Move and also, separately, reports on interest on the Gem and other JRuby at the Acts_as_Conference 2008 ([Day 1] and [Day 2]).

The Gem is a very interesting direction; not yet ready for production, but we are trying to move as quickly as we can. BTW, most of the GFv3 development traffic has succesfully moved to the DEV alias, and you can trak it there.

Vivek has a new job: help make GlassFish (v2 and v3) the preferred platform for scripting on the server-side. What languages? JRuby for sure, but we want them all, from Groovy to PHP to Jython, to... Choosing the winner is hard, we want the winner to choose us!

Check Vivek's blog for his announcement, and for his first weekend project: a Ruby Plugin for Hudson. And contact him if you want to help with the effort!

Pramod has pushed to the GlassFish Update Center Repository a freshly minted version (2.0) of the "Ruby on GlassFish Module". This includes JRuby 1.0.2, GoldSpike 808 and all you need, including Rails, Rake, ActiveRecord and more. It even comes with three samples: HelloWorldRailsApp, cookbook, and Mephisto 0.7.3. All you need to do to get started is fire the latest UpdateTool from GFv2 UR1, as in: <INSTALL_DIR>/updatecenter/bin/updatetool.

...And, no!, you didn't miss the announcement, the formal release for GFv2 UR1 won't happen until early next week, but you could go get the latest RC. Get all the details from Pramod's writeup.

A tip from Arun: JRuby on Rails, NetBeans 6 and GlassFish V2 - Simplified Steps

In three simple steps, Takai explains how to start your JRuby on Rails application using Grizzly 1.6: Step 1: Install JRuby on Rails Step 2: Prepare Rails app Step 3: Setup JRuby on Rails with Grizzly    And that's it!

Grizzly 1.6 will be integrated in GlassFish V3. The currently available v3 build contains Grizzly 1.5 and an Earlier Post shows how to How to Run jRuby on them.

The JRuby Process Models explains the difference between the processes involved when a Rails application is deployed using Grizzly and webapp mode.

Thanks to Jean-Francois for the tip!

A tip from Arun: Difference between Ruby Gem and Rails Plugin

The Divas had a tip for a video of Tor showcasing Java and Ruby Development. It is very nice, based on the demo at the JavaOne keynote. You can watch it, check the Script, or look at several other resources. But..

... I had not realized the NetBeans folks had done so much work at the NetBeans.tv site! The theme for the site is visual - videos and pictures. They have several sections emphasizing different areas: Members of the Community, Interviews with key Developers, Technology and Screencasts, Extending NB and Using the Platform and Trip Reports. Pretty nice!

Recently voted Grizzly committer Naoto TAKAI had a presentation a couple of months ago at RubyKaigi2007. The slide deck is now available here. It mentions Grizzly on Rails (see the "Ruby and jRuby, Mogrel, Goldspike, Grizzly and GlassFish" earlier post), GlassFish v3 and some interesting benchmark numbers against Mongrel, GoldSpike and WEBrick. With the appropriate underlying technology, JRuby on Rails seems to be ready for the enterprise performance-wise. Service providers would be a good judge too.

Arun has been documenting how to use Ruby, jRuby and Rails (entries). The whole jRuby team has been making improving usability very quickly so old writeups sometimes need refreshing and Tom's recent changes prompted Arun to revisit Configuring ActiveRecord. BTW, we had a recent thread on what shorthand to use to describe "Rails Running on jRuby on the Java Platform"; we settled on jRoR; what do you think?

Ruby Hack Day (see Arun's report) included a presentation by Nick Sieger on how to deploy Rails Application for production. The traditional (old?) arrangement (diagram) is to have the HTTP processing done via Mongrel and then use Mongrel_Cluster: one Rails per Mongrel, one Mongrel per (native) Ruby, each Ruby as an OS process. Nick showed 3 variants using jRuby instead of Ruby.

The first approach uses Mongrel_jCluster: one Rails per Mongrel, one Mongrel per jRuby, many jRuby per JVM. In the second approach the Rails app is packaged as a WAR, the HTTP processing is done by GlassFish and then, via the Goldspike RailsServlet delivered to Rails instances. In the third approach the requests are passed directly from the Grizzly layer to Rails.

Arun has a nice writeup capturing these options from where I stole the pictures. You may also want to check the Wiki pages on Ruby and GlassFish and on Ruby and NetBeans.

Summer is almost over and the different projects are showing renewed activity, and that includes GlassFish v3. Arun has been doing a number of screencasts around Ruby recently and the latest one shows How to Run jRuby on V3.

Other GFv3-related activity already announced includes working on the Separate JSP Project and Hg Plugin for Hudson. Stay tuned for more; things should start picking up in speed after we get GlassFish v2 out. That is still scheduled for mid-next month.

JRuby on GlassFish brings simpler deployment, access to an enormous amount of Java libraries (from JDBC/JPA to Metro) and a better availability story. NetBeans IDE provides a complete development environment for creating a JRuby application and creating the WAR file of Rails application that can be deployed on GlassFish.

A new screencast shows how NetBeans and GlassFish provide a great development and deployment platform for your Rails application. The video is divided in four fragments:

• Create a "Hello World" Rails app
• Deploy this app as WAR in GlassFish
• In Rails app, read the greeting from MySQL database
• Deploy this app as WAR in GlassFish

We're on a bit of a benchmarking kick lately. If you missed it yesterday, be sure to read about the new SPECjAppServer 2004 results for GlassFish v1 and v2. Hint: they're good. Okay, so GlassFish performs well for traditional Java EE technologies. But how well does it handle scripting languages, such as Ruby? Vishnu Gopal decided to find out, benchmarking the same app when deployed on JRuby/Glassfish versus Mongrel/C. Guess what? More good results for GlassFish. In one portion of his summary, for example, Vishnu notes that the GlassFish deployment provides "twice the reply rate in half the benchmark time."