jRuby Sanity Check

Rails
1

Hey all,

We’re building a beta for a large organization that is primarily a Java
shop. Ideally, we’d like to build the initial beta in Rails and run it
like
a traditional rails app. However, it would be great to at some point be
able to run it using jRuby on the JVM and possible integrate with their
existing systems and/or drop into Java for some performance areas. From
what I’ve read about jRuby the following appears to be true but I could
be
totally wrong:

  1. You can take an existing Rails app and, assumming all tests pass,
    just
    run it as as on JRuby.
  2. You can ‘drop into Java’ if need be to improve perforamnce of parts
    of
    an application

feel free to tell me if I’m way off

2

for the most part yes. I think the biggest snag you will hit is if your
rails app depends on any gems with only native C extensions, Jruby does
not
support those. For example, libxml wont work in JRuby along with any
other
native extension gems. That is the first thing to vet out.

Other than that, using warbler to deploy a war file has been pretty
painless
for us so far running under Tomcat 5.5.

Adam