Zoetrope

Upgrading my Tiger into a Leopard didn't break a thing in the Ruby/Rails department. Your macports should be fine.

Leopard comes with its own Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 1.2.3 you may be wondering where all the Ruby or Rails stuff is located in a fresh Leopard install:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/ruby/wiki/WhatsNewInLeopard

Add this into your config/deploy.rb.

deploy.task :restart, :roles => :app do
  restart_mongrel_cluster
end

Deploying with Capistrano 2 will not try to run the FCGI reaper script, but just restart your mongrel cluster.

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.