The TorqueBox Project

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta19 is out!

2010-03-04T00:00:00Z

Finally, TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta19 is out.

Go download it and read the documentation.

This release first and foremost includes an update to being based upon JBoss AS 6.0.0 milestone 2. To accomplish the upgrade, we’ve reworked the Maven-based build system to be linked at the elbow with the core JBoss AS build.

Additionally, on top of that, in fact, quite exceptionally, TorqueBox now uses JBoss HornetQ to power it’s messaging. Even regular JBoss AS doesn’t do that yet.

This release also sees some major changes and improvements to not just asynchronous tasks, but MQ integration in general. Be sure to check out the documentation, as new features have been added and APIs have changed some. That’s why we call it beta.

The next release will focus on some much-needed internal cleanup, a documentation refresh, and perhaps an examination of Rails 3. So far, this release ships with Rails 2.3.4.

This is what JIRA thinks we’ve accomplished:

Bug

TORQUE-57 - ActionController::send_data and send_file fail quietly
TORQUE-59 - Queue payloads object to complex objects

Task

TORQUE-66 - Update Torquebox download link in documentation
TORQUE-67 - Upgrade to JBoss AS 6 milestone 2
TORQUE-68 - Integrate HornetQ for messaging

Welcome to the new site

2010-02-28T00:00:00Z

We’ve just relaunched the TorqueBox website in preparation for our upcoming 1.0.0.Beta19 release.

The site is now generated by Awestruct a Jekyll-inspired site-baking toolkit. The entire website is generated from sources kept in a Git repository, easily forked and contributed to by anyone from the community. Additionally, we’ve enabled comments on news items and release announcements.

We’ve slightly re-organized, such as the addition of the Resources, and FAQ pages. Let us know if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements.

Presentation tonight at Asheville.rb

2009-12-02T00:00:00Z

Tonight I’ll be presenting a very Rubyist-centric introduction to TorqueBox at the Asheville.rb meeting at Locomotivity.

Asheville is my old stomping-grounds, so I’m looking forward to an evening amongst the weirdos (Keep Asheville Weird!).

You may grab a PDF copy of the slides or view them here.

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta18 Unleashed!

2009-11-05T00:00:00Z

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta18 is out right now.

Download it and read the documentation.

Mostly this fixes some bugs with the VFS support, queues with complex names, and session identification through URL manipulation (useful for Flash-based uploaders that don’t play friendly with cookies).

Update: Yes, this release is based upon JRuby 1.4.

Here’s what JIRA thinks we’ve done:

Bug

TORQUE-22 - Report errors better in the case of incomplete tasks specified in jobs.yml
TORQUE-46 - gems cannot be compiled, mvn install - compilation error
TORQUE-49 - VFS IO.open(…) does not catch existing files or open them correctly.
TORQUE-50 - Remove crypto jar from torquebox-core-deployer.jar
TORQUE-51 - StringUtils.camelize(…) will occasionally enter infinite loop
TORQUE-52 - rake torquebox:server:run assumes unix and run.sh
TORQUE-53 - ENV[**] not being set appropriately
TORQUE-55 - URL-based session-tracking leaves ;jsessionid=X in the REQUEST_URI

Task

TORQUE-42 - Adjust to Yecht for YML parsing (JRuby 1.4)

TorqueBox Presentation from Strange Loop in St. Louis

2009-10-26T00:00:00Z

Thursday, I drove 666 miles to St. Louis to present at the Strange Loop conference with John Williams. We presented a quick lay-of-the-land view of TorqueBox, hoping to inspire more people to check it out.

View our slides:

or download them

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta17 now supports Rack, Sinatra and Bundles

2009-10-26T00:00:00Z

We’re happy to announce the release of TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta17.

Take a moment to download it and read the documentation.

This release includes

Rack support (including Sinatra)
Bundle-based deployment

In all honesty, Rack support was available in Beta16, but we hadn’t documented it.

Bundle-based deployment allows you to create a Zip bundle of your application and deploy it.
This allows TorqueBox to auto-farm your application to other nodes atomically if you’re clustering.

The bundle deployments are made possible by VFS, which allows JRuby to treat resources within an archive (zip, jar) as if they were files on the filesystem.
We may document this separately for application usage once we’re happy with its quality.

On that note, due to the changes to support VFS and bundles, this release may be somewhat fragile. Even if you’re not using bundles. Please report any issues, problems or bugs in JIRA, our bug-tracking system.

Here’s what JIRA thinks we’ve done:

Bug

TORQUE-44 - TorqueBox does not pass settings from myapp-rack.yml to Merb and Sinatra

Feature Request

TORQUE-15 - Support myapp.rails bundle deployment
TORQUE-32 - VFS support for everything in Ruby

Task

TORQUE-40 - Document bare Rack support

Mailing list archives are live

2009-10-02T00:00:00Z

Thanks to the fine guys at MarkLogic, we now have both the User and Dev lists archived.

You may search/browse them collectively here:

http://torquebox.markmail.org/search/?q=

Or you may browse them individually

Enjoy!

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta16 has plenty of improvements

2009-09-30T00:00:00Z

I’m happy to announce the release of TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta16.

Go download it and read the docs now.

I’d like to especially thank GertThiel and dmilith (both on #torquebox IRC on freenode) for their input and bug-finding contributions for this release. Gert’s been working on enterprisey cache support using JBoss Cache. Expect to see that integrated in a future upcoming release. He also helped narrow down some bugs involving sessions and Rack integration (TORQUE-38 and TORQUE-39).

Included in this release, though:

Bug

TORQUE-20 - Ensure task queues fully undeploy
TORQUE-23 - Fix jobs.yml documentation
TORQUE-28 - Removing *-rails.yml from $JBOSS_HOME/server/*/deploy does not undeploy the application.
TORQUE-35 - Specifying context in web.yml causes NPE
TORQUE-36 - When using a context, relative paths are wrong if a trailing slash is not included
TORQUE-37 - Rails’ production.log shouldn’t be mixed into JBoss AS’ server.log
TORQUE-38 - Set Rack’s env[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]
TORQUE-39 - Servlet-based session-store initialization fails for RAILS_ENV=production

Task

TORQUE-29 - Create a rails application template
TORQUE-31 - Support generic Rack frameworks (sinatra, etc) and config.ru

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta15 is out, and it's good.

2009-09-19T00:00:00Z

Quick on the heels of 1.0.0.Beta14, I’m happy to announce 1.0.0.Beta15.

Download it and read the documentation now.

First off, this release re-enabled multiple versions of Rails. Feel free to use anything 2.2.2+. This include 2.3.4.

By default the TorqueBox distribution ships with 2.3.4, but you may certainly use others.

Which brings us to some major new functionality: running apps using Rails gems. You no longer have to freeze rails into your app. You certainly may still freeze Rails, and vendor/rails/ will take precedence. Or you can just specify the RAILS_GEM_VERSION variable in your config/environment.rb.

Also, any other gems specified in your environment.rb can be pulled in from the global Gem path.

As usual, rake gems:install will attempt to install your app’s gems into the global Gem path.

The full list of bugs fixed since 1.0.0.Beta14:

TORQUE-5 - Rails Gem should be loadable from shared JRUBY_HOME-based gempath.
TORQUE-24 - rails.bat missing
TORQUE-26 - reset_session fails with nil

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta14 Released

2009-09-16T00:00:00Z

After a hiatus while I worked on cloud stuff, we’re back to cranking on TorqueBox.

I’m happy to announce version 1.0.0.Beta14.

Download it and read the documentation.

This release includes only a few changes:

Fewer gratuitous JRuby runtime instantiations. This shaved ~30s off application deployment time on my laptop
Standardized on YAML-handling library. This reduces our dependencies by 1.
Support for public/index.html being served if necessary.
Re-enabling symlink deployments of RAILS_ROOTs
Documentation improvements by Jean Deruelle on the telecom/SIP bits

For this release, Rails 2.3.2 is still the recommended version to use. Rails 2.3.3 will work, but controllers will not be reloaded, even in the development environment.

Rails 2.3.4 fails entirely. It appears that in fixing the controller-reloading bug in 2.3.3, they possibly added a thread/mutex bug.

So, stick with 2.3.2, or 2.3.3 if you don’t mind not having your code reload.

The next release will focus on getting us working happily with the latest versions of Rails.

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta13 available now

2009-06-22T00:00:00Z

The TorqueBox Ruby application platform has reached 1.0.0.Beta13 and is available now.

This release includes a handful of improvements, including some for hybrid Java/Ruby shops:

Finer-grained control by supporting web.xml
Support for jboss-web.xml and *-ds.xml

And some for everyone:

Runtime pool management for non-threadsafe mode
Specify context-path when deploying with rake

The list of closed JIRA entries:

Bug

TORQUE-9 - Torquebox not using config/jboss-web.xml to configure jndi references, etc.

Feature Request

TORQUE-8 - Allow to specify the deploy context path from the rake task
TORQUE-10 - Enable JRuby pooling to be configured manually, even with “threadsafe” Rails (2.2+)

Task

TORQUE-12 - Re-enable RSpec tests
TORQUE-14 - Document pooling.yml

As always, see the downloads page for all of the downloadable artifacts, and the latest documentation is also available.

Screencast: Scheduled Jobs with TorqueBox

2009-05-30T00:00:00Z

The second screencast in our introductory series about TorqueBox is now available.

This screencast, Scheduled Jobs with TorqueBox, shows you how to go beyond Rails and set up scheduled jobs.

Also available in downloadable formats:

Screencast: Getting Started with TorqueBox

2009-05-29T00:00:00Z

We’re proud to release the first in a series of screencasts about TorqueBox.

This screencast, Getting Started with TorqueBox, will walk you through the installation and configuration of the TorqueBox server. Then it will demonstrate building a Rails application from scratch.

All in about 5 minutes.

Also available in downloadable formats:

TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta12 Released!

2009-05-25T00:00:00Z

We’ve just released version 1.0.0.Beta12 of the TorqueBox Server.

This release includes updates to documentation, repackaging of Ruby bits as bonafide RubyGems, and respecting the TorqueBox-shipped JRuby gem repository from within the server.

This change means much easier configuration of a Rails project for running on TorqueBox.
At this point, you only have to freeze Rails itself. Other Gems you depend on may be used from TorqueBox the gem repository.

Additionally, this version of TorqueBox is based upon JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA, released over the weekend.

The documentation regarding preparing your Rails application for deployment on TorqueBox describes the necessary steps.

Per usual, you can browse the documentation, download the complete binary distribution, and participate on the mailing lists.

Here’s the list of JIRA issues closed between 1.0.0.Beta11 and 1.0.0.Beta12:

Bug

TORQUE-2 - Rails support documentation is lacking
TORQUE-7 - Fix endpoint_configuration per documentation

Feature Request

TORQUE-1 - Support JRUBY_HOME
TORQUE-3 - Ruby packages should be packaged as .gems
TORQUE-4 - JRuby shipped with TorqueBox should include JDBC and TorqueBox gems pre-installed

Task

TORQUE-6 - Upgrade included JBossAS to 5.1.0.GA

Announcing the TorqueBox Project

2009-05-18T00:00:00Z

What is TorqueBox?

The TorqueBox project develops the open-source, full-featured Ruby application platform built upon the research, code and success of the JBoss Rails project.

TorqueBox Server provides compatibility with Ruby frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails, while also providing additional functionality.

Job scheduling
Task queues
SOAP serving
Telecom

Download TorqueBox Server

Today also marks the release of 1.0.0.Beta11 of the project. Downloads are available in a variety of forms.

Documentation continues to improve with each release, is browsable online, or downloadable in HTML and PDF formats.

Relationship to JBoss Rails

The JBoss Rails project is immediately retired, with all code and team members moving to the TorqueBox project. Effectively, this is just a renaming of the project.

The former JBoss Rails mailing list will soon be retired. The TorqueBox project provides several lists for your participation.

The Git repositories holding the former JBoss Rails code will remain indefinitely. New development will occur within the TorqueBox repositories at GitHub.

Upcoming Events

The TorqueBox project will be represented at the JBoss booth at JavaOne.