Zoetrope

JRuby has been getting traction in the last couple of months, and has just released JRuby 1.0. I've tested a couply of Ruby scripts and they seem to be running fine. I haven't looked into running a Rails app in JRuby. I noticed running them from the command-line was not that fast compared to using the normal Ruby interpreter, but apparently that's because JRuby really performs better after the first boot. Check out this little primer in using JRuby.

Perusing the web I came across an example of deploying Mephisto onto GlassFish, a new open-source Java application server which has support for deploying a Rails app by just changing the database configuration to use a jdbc-driver, because JRuby doesn't support native extensions. It even supports running PHP applications (see GlassFish supported containers).

Another post describes a Rails deployment using a WAR

Apparently GlassFish was developed to include built-in clustering, load-balancing and High Availability, so if the future brings us these things by just deploying our (multiple) apps into GlassFish, and thus into one of the best VM's in existence), we'll have to keep an eye out for this app-server.

It would still be cool to see someone listening to Avi and just got Ruby running on the Strongtalk VM (StrongRuby, anyone?) though.