JRuby on Rails status

JRuby 0.9.1 is out for a week. This is the first version in which JRuby really starts to perform and behave properly. Though Ruby on Rails has been reported to work on JRuby for a longer time, this was not repeated by many people; too many loopholes to jump through. However, with the advent of version 0.9.1 there are suddenly many people on the mailing list that are trying and achieving exactly this.

Another promising release was done yesterday in Japan: rails-asyncweb 0.1, a very fast web server for JRuby on Rails. TAKAI, Naoto's asyncweb uses AsyncWeb, a web server that prevents the synchronization pitfall that the Java Servlet API brings. AsyncWeb scales a lot better under load then traditional Java web servers. And the performance rocks! It is about 10 times faster then Webbrick under loads to 10 concurrent users. It will be very interesting to see what happens under much much larger loads. I am also curious how this will compare to Mongrel, Zed Shaw's successor for Webbrick in the C-Ruby world. Another interesting question is whether this will end Mongrel's Java port.

Another web framework that works under JRuby is Camping. Camping is smaller then 4K, but quite powerful. It is a creation of the well known Ruby virtuoso why the lucky stiff. If you want to get a feel for what Ruby can do but don't want to learn Ruby on Rails (which I found quite a large task) I recommend you try out Camping. Ola Bini has a nice tutorial on getting you started. (Note: you should not use Camping version 1.5 because JRuby does not support continuations.) Another very good Camping tutorial (Dutch) was written by Remco van 't Veer.

Update 2006-10-30: added Remco's tutorial.