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.

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 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)

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.</p>

View our slides:

or download them

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