Jruby Application distribution

ruby-talk
1

Hi All

Apologies if this is a FAQ but I've not been able to find it.

I am considering writing an app that would run on many different
platforms, Linux x86, mainframe linux, AIX and Windows are likely.
The Java runtime environments will already be installed on all of
these but the SDK won't and I am not likely to be allowed to install
the SDK on the many machines that would run the app.

Is it possible to package up my ruby app, and a stripped down Jruby
for distribution, requiring only the JRE on the target machine?

Thanks

Steve.

2

zyzygy@telstra.com wrote:

Hi All

Apologies if this is a FAQ but I've not been able to find it.

I am considering writing an app that would run on many different
platforms, Linux x86, mainframe linux, AIX and Windows are likely.
The Java runtime environments will already be installed on all of
these but the SDK won't and I am not likely to be allowed to install
the SDK on the many machines that would run the app.

Is it possible to package up my ruby app, and a stripped down Jruby
for distribution, requiring only the JRE on the target machine?

Absolutely. Look at the rawr library.

http://gitorious.org/projects/rawr

It offers a variety of ways to bundle up JRuby apps. Happy Camper uses it when distributing our commercial apps.

ยทยทยท

--
James Britt

www.happycamperstudios.com - Wicked Cool Coding
www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff

3

zyzygy@telstra.com wrote:

Hi All

Apologies if this is a FAQ but I've not been able to find it.

I am considering writing an app that would run on many different
platforms, Linux x86, mainframe linux, AIX and Windows are likely.
The Java runtime environments will already be installed on all of
these but the SDK won't and I am not likely to be allowed to install
the SDK on the many machines that would run the app.

Is it possible to package up my ruby app, and a stripped down Jruby
for distribution, requiring only the JRE on the target machine?

James already mentioned Rawr, but I wanted to jump in and mention that the "stripped-down" question has come up before. Yes, we would love to have a stripped down deployment for JRuby, but we haven't done that just yet. Mostly it's because the same things we'd strip out are the ones that reduce startup time or make it possible to run JRuby as fast as possible in limited environments like applets.

But it's definitely a direction we're looking at. The ability to take a single file and have basically an entire Ruby implementation is obviously huge, and if it's possible to make that file only contain the parts of Ruby you need...all the better.

- Charlie