fnokd!

I announced the TorqueBox project today.

It’s the coolest platform for your Ruby applications, ever.  Really.

Just a reminder, in case anyone didn’t make the jump..
My Ruby/Rails/JBoss blogging is going on over at Odd Thesis these days.
That includes this announcement about the 1.0.0-Beta-2 release that just popped.

Just when I’ve trained my boss to read this blog to keep up with my status, I go and launch another blog, specifically for my workstuff.  In addition to blogs about JBoss things, it’ll include other documentation for building, installing and using the related projects.  The projects are grouped into constellations based around theses.  Hence [...]

Thanks to the typical demo demons, I’ve been unable to get everything functioning perfect for instantaneous clustering on EC2 by tomorrow.
Oh well.
But here’s the first draft of some slides I’m taking with me to the Raleigh RubyCamp.

It’s a BarCamp style event, so I anticipate the slides probably changing throughout the day. I’ll published updates [...]

On my path towards clustering a Rails app on JBoss on EC2, I stumbled across Bryan Kearney and the other Thincrust guys. With their help, I now have a JBoss AS5 + jboss-rails “appliance” ready to roll.
Grab the raw image or the VMWare image, and play along at home.
Fire up the image in your favorite [...]

It can sometimes be funny, the paths we take.
Once I’d verified that a Rails app deployed on JBoss would indeed cluster, I sat in my farmhouse, looking at my lone little Mac.  Not much of a cluster to play with.
So I started looking at Amazon EC2, which is truly very nice, particularly when paired with [...]

Don’t forget, in a few weeks at the Red Hat offices in Raleigh, there will be an unconference-style Ruby BarCamp on October 18th.

My plan is to put together a few clumps of slides, prepare a cluster on EC2, and see if anyone wants to hear about JBoss Rails.  I’ll of course put them online sometimes [...]

Rysiek asked me to elucidate my clustering on OSX…
By default, it seems that OSX provides exactly 1 localhost address, unlike RHEL.  I normally make use of 127.0.0.1/24 when I’m deploying on Linux, and figured I’d do the same on OSX.
To accomplish this, you need to create some new localhost IPs to play with.

sudo ifconfig lo0 [...]

JBoss on Rails will indeed cluster!
After modifying and dropping my jboss-rails.deployer into an ‘all’ configured server of JBoss AS 5, and firing up 3 instances on my localhost (non-trivial on OSX…):

10:43:28,409 INFO [RPCManagerImpl] Received new cluster view: [127.0.0.10:63740|2] [127.0.0.10:63740, 127.0.0.11:63747, 127.0.0.12:63749]
10:43:28,435 INFO [RPCManagerImpl] Cache local address is 127.0.0.12:63749
10:43:28,469 INFO [ComponentRegistry] JBoss Cache [...]

Since JBoss AS 5 is built on top of Microcontainer, it’s effectively a network of beans just doing their respective jobs.  You have already probably noticed that it ships with 3 included configurations: minimal, default, and all.
Unfortunately, they’re awefully far apart along the spectrum of configuration options.  The minimal configuration barely gets the container running, [...]