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JBoss on Rails: Deploying Rails Apps to a JBoss App Server

In Deployment, Documentation

Java-heads will be familiar with JBoss, a popular Java EE-based application server. Bob McWhirter has been working on a plugin to make it easy to deploy Rails applications to a JBoss app server - something that could be quite appealing if you work in a Java-only zone (common in managed deployment situations) or if you want to sell your code to enterprises with this restriction. Bob's deployer is called, simply, jboss-rails (Github repository) and it deploys Rails applications to JBoss AS 5.x servers using JRuby and JRuby-Rack. He's also written several blog posts about it. JBoss on Rails gives an overview of actually deploying an app, JBoR: Will it cluster? looks at the clustering situation, and there are instructions for installing and using jboss-rails. There are also some slides from a presentation he recently gave at Raleigh RubyCamp. Rails has already been easily deployable in Java-land by using Glassfish, but it's nice to see other options available.

In comments, Rich adds (thanks!):

FYI — Rails on other Java appservers is old news. ThoughtWorks runs Mingle on Jetty (early '07), Oracle runs http://mix.oracle.com on Oracle App Server (Oct '07), and I've seen one or two other sites running on WebLogic.

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8 Comment Responses to “JBoss on Rails: Deploying Rails Apps to a JBoss App Server”

  1. #1
    Rich Says:

    FYI -- Rails on other Java appservers is old news. ThoughtWorks runs Mingle on Jetty (early '07), Oracle runs http://mix.oracle.com on Oracle App Server (Oct '07), and I've seen one or two other sites running on WebLogic.

  2. #2
    Peter Cooper Says:

    Thanks for the clarification - I've added it to the post.

  3. #3
    Robert Dempsey Says:

    Not to downplay the benefits of easy deployment and updating of applications, and not having to install new software (Mongrel, Apache), what are the other benefits? Do Java app servers run Rails faster? Can you scale the applications across servers easier?

  4. #4
    Brian Ketelsen Says:

    I just posted a review of this on my blog : http://brianketelsen.blogspot.com/2008/11/jboss-rails-plugin.html To answer one of the previous questions by my esteemed Florida neighbor, JBoss clustering will allow you to deploy to one server and the app will propagate to all the other servers in the cluster. It will also allow shared in-memory sessions. There are a lot of good benefits to running Rails on a full application server, and this plugin is a really good start towards making it dead simple.

  5. #5
    purzelrakete Says:

    That feels so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.

  6. #6
    Peter Cooper Says:

    In a "it feels so wrong but so right" type way, or just a "totally wrong" way?

  7. #7
    purzelrakete Says:

    @petercooper jboss brings back memories of developing with struts, spring and hibernate. not that there's anything wrong with jboss. much like rails + websphere... it's just... wrong! ;)

  8. #8
    stf Says:

    Wrong in the sense of getting access to at least halfway integrated stack of infrastructure for messaging, deployment, clustering, thread- and connection-pooling etc.?! Instead of perpetuating the very same prejudices against running rails on a full blown jee-stack, I'd really liked to see some more projects exploiting the fact that you don't have to jump through hoops (even if it is only in the backgrounDRb...) just to get something processed asynchrounosly....

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