I don’t pimp Joyent products much, but I’ll do so for this one. In our new Joyent Accelerators JRuby is pre-installed and ready to run out of the box. Joyent is a key player in the Ruby on Rails world, hosting some of the biggest (Twitter) and best (Ebible) Rails sites on the net. I’m glad to say that we’re the first hosting company to get behind and seriously advocate JRuby for production use.

Getting started is easy. In our Accelerators you’ll JRuby 1.0.0RC2 in /opt/jruby. JRuby comes complete with the jruby interpreter which is used just like ruby, including friends like gem, jirb, and more. Lets take a look at how to get started:

[z010101CA:~] admin$ export PATH=/opt/jruby/bin:$PATH 
[z010101CA:~] admin$ jirb
irb(main):001:0> string = 'JRuby Rules\!'
=> "JRuby Rules\\!"
irb(main):002:0> print string
JRuby Rules\!=> nil
irb(main):003:0> string.upcase
=> "JRUBY RULES\\!"
irb(main):004:0> quit

Its really just that simple. Want to do some JRuby on Rails work?

[z010101CA:~] admin$ which gem
gem is /opt/jruby/bin/gem
[z010101CA:~] admin$ gem list --local

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

sources (0.0.1)
    This package provides download sources for remote gem installation

[z010101CA:~] admin$ sudo gem install rails -y
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed rails-1.2.3
Successfully installed rake-0.7.3
Successfully installed activesupport-1.4.2
Successfully installed activerecord-1.15.3
Successfully installed actionpack-1.13.3
Successfully installed actionmailer-1.3.3
Successfully installed actionwebservice-1.2.3
...

[z010101CA:~] admin$ sudo chmod +r /opt/jruby/bin/*
Password:
[z010101CA:~] admin$ which rails
rails is hashed (/opt/jruby/bin/rails)
[z010101CA:~] admin$ rails webstore
      create  
      create  app/controllers
      create  app/helpers
     ........
[z010101CA:~] admin$ cd webstore/
[z010101CA:~/webstore] admin$ jruby script/server 
=> Booting WEBrick...
=> Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options
[2007-05-27 07:00:52] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2007-05-27 07:00:52] INFO  ruby 1.8.5 (2007-05-16) [java]
[2007-05-27 07:00:52] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=33409388 port=3000
24.6.105.152 - - [27/May/2007:07:01:20 GMT] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7552
- -> /
24.6.105.152 - - [27/May/2007:07:01:20 GMT] "GET /javascripts/prototype.js HTTP/1.1" 200 71260
http://8.12.34.20:3000/ -> /javascripts/prototype.js
24.6.105.152 - - [27/May/2007:07:01:20 GMT] "GET /javascripts/effects.js HTTP/1.1" 200 38200
http://8.12.34.20:3000/ -> /javascripts/effects.js
24.6.105.152 - - [27/May/2007:07:01:21 GMT] "GET /images/rails.png HTTP/1.1" 200 1787
http://8.12.34.20:3000/ -> /images/rails.png
24.6.105.152 - - [27/May/2007:07:01:21 GMT] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 0
- -> /favicon.ico
...

Its that simple. No tricks, no gimmicks. Just start playing.

In particular, we’re excited about the plethora of mature Java features that can be brought into the Rails world, including JDBC and real threading.

For those who don’t have a Joyent Accelerator, download JRuby here: JRuby.org.