News

Recently, we've made some progress toward the promise of a polyglot application server. With the introduction of the Overlay project, it's now very easy to create a single app server capable of deploying both Ruby and Clojure (not to mention Java, of course) applications.

Laying TorqueBox over Immutant

The same Leiningen Immutant plugin that you use to install Immutant may be used to overlay the latest TorqueBox as well:

$ lein immutant overlay torquebox

And voila, your Immutant is suddenly also a TorqueBox! Now we need to set up your environment for TorqueBox development.

$ export TORQUEBOX_HOME=$HOME/.lein/immutant/current
$ export PATH=$TORQUEBOX_HOME/jruby/bin:$PATH

The TorqueBox distribution provides its own JRuby with the TorqueBox gems pre-installed. You can now use the torquebox command to deploy your Ruby applications to your Immutant!

Laying Immutant over TorqueBox

If you'd rather use your own JRuby, and you've already installed the torquebox-server gem, you can overlay the latest Immutant by cloning the Overlay project locally, installing Leiningen and running the following:

$ lein run :overlay $(torquebox env TORQUEBOX_HOME) immutant

All that's left is to set IMMUTANT_HOME and proceed as you normally would:

$ export IMMUTANT_HOME=$(torquebox env TORQUEBOX_HOME)

The Overlay project is capable of overlaying features from any JBoss AS7 distribution onto another one.

Convenient Combo-Pack

For your convenience, we've set up a job on our CI server to overlay the latest Immutant build atop the latest TorqueBox build whenever either is updated. So you can be on the bleeding edge of both projects by downloading and extracting this link:

http://immutant.org/builds/torquebox-immutant.zip

Set both TORQUEBOX_HOME and IMMUTANT_HOME to the extracted directory, and...

Get Your Polyglot On!

Your overlaid server may be started however you're comfortable: either using the Leiningen Immutant plugin, the TorqueBox command or even the standard JBoss commands. It will start up all the apps you've deployed to it, regardless of their language.

If you have any trouble at all, please drop by #torquebox or #immutant on freenode, and we'll get you going.

This past Friday I had the pleasure of presenting "The Polyglot Future of JBoss AS" to an audience of mostly Java developers at DevIgnition in NoVA.

Thanks to Gray Herter for organizing a great conference, and to Booz Allen Hamilton for sharing their kick-butt conference center.

If you are interested in the code for the demo, that's here.

The talk was recorded, so once that recording is available I'll update this post to point to it.

Here are my slides from that presentation for the enjoyment of all: