Tomorrow is my first real status update call with my boss, Sacha Labourey.  I’ve been anxious to deliver something, to prove I hadn’t gone completely pudding-brained during my tenure as management.

This morning, it all finally came together in a pleasing fashion, causing me to hoot and holler loud enough to scare the cats and probably some cows.

I’ve just pushed an ugly-but-working deployer targeting JBoss-AS 5.0.0.CR2 (the latest and greatest!)

It’s not very consumable at this point, as it’s just a deployer, not a nice Rails plugin with a set of Rake tasks.  Heck, it doesn’t even undeploy yet.

But adding the deployer to your server’s deployers/ directory allows you symlink live RAILS_ROOTs into your deploy/ directory, and be running on JBoss.

Live.  In-situ.  Edit your controllers or views as you like, and your changes are immediately reflected in the running instance.  Just like with ./script/server.  It does not even have to redeploy your app.  The rails framework is handling the magic reloading.

It’s taken me some time to dig through the innards of JBoss-Microcontainer, and a few false starts, but I finally figured out a super simple deployment process.

I’d previously been trying to manipulate a RAILS_ROOT into a synthetic Java WAR archive, and shoe-horn things around that.  But I have the freedom to go lower than that, so the jboss-rails deployer just sets up a Catalina context appropriately, without regard to WEB-INF or other non-Rails stuff.  There’s no need for that cruft.  Likewise, I can directly control and manipulate the classpath, so the RAILS_ROOT does not even have to have any JRuby bits in it.

The example application (src/test/ballast) is a virgin rails app with ActiveRecord disabled so I don’t have to deal with database-driver gems just yet.

Once deployed, a Rails app looks like pretty much any other web-app.  The jboss.rails.deployment domain contains deployment objects for each rails app.  And jboss.web contains all the webby bits floating around.

I need to go  back and remove the dead-end code I’ve left in my wake, and update the tests I’d disabled while in a coding flury (bad Bob!)  I plan to put together an easy-to-consume plugin gem which contains an nicely-configured AS along with the jboss-rails deployer pre-installed, along with rake tasks to start/stop AS, and deploy your app.  I’d also like to give clustering a whirl, and see what we can do.

It’s been an excellent 3 weeks back as an engineer.