Re: JRuby on Rails

The thought of deploying Rails using a "CGI servlet" has come up in
the past, and I agree it would be the best way to deploy Rails in a
typical Java/JavaEE environment. I can't speak for Tom, but I think
the tack he's taking is that Socket needs work anyway, so WEBrick is
as good a challenge as any to make that happen; having a working
Socket will also allow much of the builtin DB code in Rails to work
out of the box, without JDBC connectors.

However, I do agree with the CGI servlet deployment...I can't wait
until I can deploy a Rails app inside an n-server cluster with full
failover and JDBC-based adapters to container-managed connection
pools. Too cool.

So then, speaking of JDBC-based adapters...Neither Tom nor I have dug
much into the internals of ActiveRecord adapters, and so we're not
sure what would be required to make this work. How much do you
understand of the implementation of these adapters? Enough to start
playing around with something?

If I were to say how people could best help us get Rails working, it
would be to create scripts that excercise small parts of Rails
independent of the full, running application. For example, a script we
could run that would use ActiveRecord along, or other subsystems on
their own. Running the full end-to-end is illustrative and certainly
calls out bugs quickly, but it doesn't really give us an idea of how
close we are to getting everything working.

Beyond that, I know there's a number of utility scripts within Rails
that handle various parts of generation, administration, updating, and
so on. I am not yet familiar with those scripts, so I'm mostly
sticking to the bits I know. Anyone else trying out these scripts and
reporting successes and failures would be most welcome. You ought even
be able to use JRuby against an existing, pre-generated Rails install
to test some of those additional scripts.

On another note, it's good to know that I'm not just writing those
blog entries for myself. I'll try to keep updating it.

- Charlie

On 2/21/06, Nick Sieger <nicksieger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> Saw Charlie's post today:
> http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/02/making-progress-on-rails.html
>
> First of all, great news!  Glad to hear you're getting this going.  This is
> definitely exciting stuff  I thought I'd weigh in with a thought.
>
> Running Rails on WEBrick -- it would certainly be cool to get WEBrick
> working, but in my mind, there's a potentially easier path that may avoid
> the Socket and IO issues.   Create a JRubyCGIServlet that would attempt to
> run Rails as a CGI using JRuby inside Tomcat or another existing servlet
> container, and then implement a compatibility shim between servlet
> HttpServletRequest/Responses and Ruby's CGI.rb.  Have you thought of this
> before?  This is simplifying the problem greatly, so I may have overlooked
> something, but it seems like an interesting approach.  This approach would
> also be much more palatable to existing java shops since you could run Rails
> completely within the existing java infrastructure.
>
> The other major remaining issue I can think of right now of course would be
> to implement JDBC versions of the popular database adapters.  It seems like
> you may have to do this somewhat specifically to each database driver since
> the DB-specific connection code is usually require'd in by the connection
> adapter.  The JDBC versions would probably have to simulate and replace the
> Ruby versions.
>
> Do you have a running list of the major roadblocks that exist for running
> Rails?  I'm definitely interested in this enough to potentially carve some
> time in the near future to work on it.  What would it be best for me to
> start playing with?
>
> Cheers,
> /Nick
>
>


--
Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
JRuby Developer @ jruby.sourceforge.net
Application Architect @ www.ventera.com


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