TorqueBox 4 Update
Lots of community users have been asking about TorqueBox 4 recently, so it's probably past time to talk about TorqueBox 4 a bit and give a roadmap update.
For starters, the gem we've published as 'torqbox' and any references to that codename are being wrapped into TorqueBox 4.
We have a couple of high-level goals with TorqueBox 4:
-
The various RubyGems we provide should be fully-functional libraries, usable just like any other RubyGem. No application server is required.
-
Applications using our gems can optionally be deployed to a stock WildFly or JBoss EAP server.
Just RubyGems
TorqueBox 4 will no longer have a large .zip download or the large torquebox-server gem. Instead, we'll have a handful of smaller gems (torquebox-web, torquebox-messaging, torquebox-scheduling, etc) that can be added to any JRuby application.
Want to switch your JRuby application from another web server to
TorqueBox 4? Just add 'torquebox-web' to your Gemfile, bundle
install
, and rackup -s torquebox
.
Want to use our messaging and scheduling but something else for your
web requests? Just add 'torquebox-messaging' and
'torquebox-scheduling' to your Gemfile, bundle install
, and start
using our APIs.
We provide an all-in-one set of components tested with each other that gets pulled in with the 'torquebox' gem. But, you're also free to pick-and-choose individual components if you don't want the full stack.
Application servers
If you need or want to use an application server, we'll still make it easy to run JRuby applications on top of WildFly and JBoss EAP. Applications written against our APIs will be able to go from running directly on the command-line to running inside the application server without changing the application or the application server. We'll take advantage of the application server to enable more advanced functionality when run inside of it, such as:
- web session replication
- load-balanced message distribution
- highly-available singleton scheduled jobs
- flexible cache replication
- multiple polyglot application deployments
Following along
If you'd like to follow along or contribute to the TorqueBox 4 development, it currently takes place on the torqbox branch. We'll be merging that to master before too long and will give a heads-up on the developer mailing list when that happens.
If you'd like to give TorqueBox 4 a try, for now you'll need to build from source on that branch. The README.md has instructions on doing so.
Once we get some incremental builds of TorqueBox 4 and its documentation published somewhere, we'll do another blog post that shows how to use those incremental builds.
Roadmap
TorqueBox 4.0 by mid-to-late 2014
We'll be putting out some 4.0 alpha / beta releases soon and hope to get 4.0 out by the middle of September. A lot of things will not be backwards compatible with TorqueBox 3.
At a minimum this will contain web, scheduling, messaging, and caching APIs. Each API may not exactly duplicate the features we have today in TorqueBox 3, but we'll add features where appropriate with each new minor release.
TorqueBox 4.1 by early 2015
The main focus of 4.1 will be easing the transition from TorqueBox 3. This means writing an in-depth migration guide as well as deciding what, if any, APIs we want to provide a backwards-compatibility layer for. Early adopters will be encouraged to migrate to TorqueBox 4.0 and provide feedback so we can make the migration as smooth as possible for everyone else in TorqueBox 4.1.
We'll also save time to add in some features missing from 4.0 that existed in 3.1, based on community feedback.
TorqueBox 3 in maintenance mode
We'll continue to fix bugs in TorqueBox 3 and put out releases as-needed, but don't expect any new features there. The tentative plan is to stop fixing bugs in TorqueBox 3 approximately one year after we release TorqueBox 4.
More to come
This was just a high-level overview of where TorqueBox 4 stands and what it will be. We'll be going into a lot more depth on various pieces in future posts.
Feedback welcome!
We welcome and encourage feedback from our potential users, current users, and especially our production users. Please get in touch if you have questions, concerns, or comments about TorqueBox 4.