JRuby on Rails with Nine Lives: Running a JRuby on Rails Application on Tomcat

Installing Goldspike

To get your app to deploy to a Java server, you must install a Rails Integration plugin called Goldspike.

Change to the railswartest directory and run the following command to add the plugin to your app:

jruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/
   jruby-extras/trunk/rails-integration/plugins/goldspike

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Figure 4: Installing Goldspike into your JRuby on Rails application

Goldspike adds some new rake (Ruby version of Make) tasks that allow you to create a WAR (Web Application ARchive) file of your Rails application. WAR files are the standard way of packaging and deploying Java-based web applications. Run the following command to ensure you have the war rake tasks available now to your app:

jruby –S rake tasks

MySQL JDBC Driver Installation and Configuration

You will use MySQL for your database. You need to download the MySQL 5 JDBC driver and extract it into a directory. There will be a MySQL JDBC driver file mysql-connector-java-5.0.6-bin.jar in the directory. Copy this file into the $JRUBY_HOME/lib directory and rename it to mysql-connector-java-5.0.6.jar:

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Figure 5: Installing MySQL JDBC driver into JRuby

You will need to add the MySQL JDBC 5 driver to the list of Java libraries that the Goldspike plugin includes when it builds the WAR file for your application. It will pick this file up from the $JRUBY_HOME/lib directory. Within the railswartest directory, edit the vendor/plugins/goldspike/lib/war_config.rb file and the following to the java_libraries list:

add_java_library(maven_library ('mysql', 'mysql-connector-java',
                                '5.0.6'))

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Figure 6: Adding the MySQL 5 JDBC driver to the Goldspike Java libraries list