JRuby on App Engine

Google App Engine 0.0.19 gems released

2010-12-03T18:04:00.001-08:00

We just released the 0.0.19 google-appengine gem. App Engine's infrastructure can now anticipate the need for more resources and warm up new application instances (in the background) before routing user traffic to them. You can also reserve three instances by purchasing "Always On" for $9 per month. See the 1.4.0 blog post for more information.

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.17
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.4.0
App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.12
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.22

JRuby 1.5.6 - The JRuby team just shipped a new release that contains a the "object stream" fix we need for Mirah, thanks guys!

Nokogiri Java - We have a new 1.5.0.beta.3 gem for pure-Java Nokogiri. Thanks to @yokolet for her work continuing feature development on the pure-java version. We're in the home stretch

Mirah and Dubious - We now have gems for Mirah and Dubious, thanks @baroquebobcat, you're a hero. Even with background warming of Rails instances, Mirah and Dubious provide an simple way to cut server response time down to a fraction of what it takes to pass through the entire Rails stack.

App Engine Prerelease SDK 1.4.0

2010-11-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

There was an interesting post to the App Engine list http://goo.gl/zFcsu where Ikai wrote...

"The Always On feature allows applications to pay and keep 3 instances of their application always running, which can significantly reduce application latency. Developers can now enable Warmup Requests. By specifying a handler in an app's appengine-web.xml, App Engine will attempt to to send a Warmup Request to initialize new instances before a user interacts with it. This can reduce the latency an end-user sees for initializing your application."

This is means that JRuby (Sinatra or Rails) applications will work much better on App Engine. Users will not experience spin-up delays as they have in the past because new instances will spin-up in the background. Look for documentation on this very soon.

Google App Engine 0.0.18 gems released

2010-10-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

We recently released the 0.0.18 google-appengine gem, which includes the 1.3.8 SDK. The admin console now provides information about application instances. See the 1.3.8 blog post for more information.

App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.8
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.21

Rails and Datastore - Josh Moore recently pushed rails_dm_datastore 0.2.16, and appengine-paginator 0.1.3. DataMapper 1.0.0 is now supported by the adapter and the Rails 2.3.x setup script. I've also recently pushed dm-appengine 0.1.3, with required changes from Josh Moore.

Rails 2.3.10 - I updated the rails_appengine gem to support Rails 2.3.10. I will have a Rails 3.0 script shortly. App Engine will eventually provide hosted SQL, so we'll have support for ActiveRecord as well.

JRuby 1.5.5 - The JRuby team has released a new version of JRuby. We're using jruby-jars 1.5.5 in our demo Rails 2.3.x app, works great.

RubyConf - I've been busy with a side project, so I won't be able to present at RubyConf, but Nick Howard (@baroquebobcat) will be presenting on Mirah and Dubious. Bob Aman (@sporkmonger) will also be giving an App Engine update and show off the Ruby APIs he's been building for Google, including the signet gem for OAuth.

Google App Engine 0.0.17 gems released

2010-09-04T03:08:00.001-07:00

We just released the 0.0.17 google-appengine gem. The 1.3.7 SDK is a bugfix release for 1.3.6. The getServingUrl() function for the new dynamic image resizing service was throwing a SecurityException in the SDK. For more information, see the recent post on the High-Performance Image Serving System.

App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.7
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.20

Let us know if you have sample JRuby and Mirah apps that take advantage of any of the new APIs.

DM Adapter - David Masover just pushed dm-appengine 0.1.1. Pluralized default storage names are deprecated on App Engine and will be changed! To use singular storage names on an existing app, you will need to run a migration on your data.

Rails 2.3.9 - I updated the rails_appengine gem to support Rails 2.3.9. I've also updated the setup scripts for 2.3.5, 2.3.8 and 2.3.9. Based on this rack bug, it looks like we'll have Rails 2.3.10 soon.

Rails 3.0 - Now that Rails 3.0 and Bundler 1.0 have been released, we can start working on a new setup script. The main issue right now is that Bundler 1.0 doesn't work without Rubygems, so we will need to merge in functionality from Bundler08, and create our own environment file.

Dubious Demos - Recently, Michal Hantl (@michal_hantl) built a couple Dubious demo apps. Dubious is still very limited, but you can certainly build simple apps, and they spin-up in about a second.

Ruby|Web Conf - On September 10th, Nick Howard (@baroquebobcat) will be presenting Extreme Performance with Mirah and Dubious at Ruby|Web Conference in Snowbird. Nick has been working on the continuous build system and generators for Dubious.

Google App Engine 0.0.16 gems released

2010-08-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

We just released the 0.0.16 google-appengine gem. The big change for JRuby with this release was that app.yaml must now live in the WEB-INF dir. See 1.3.6 Release Post for more information.

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.16
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.6
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.19

The appengine-tools will automatically move app.yaml into WEB-INF, but if you have app.yaml files in both locations, the one outside WEB-INF will be ignored.

Rails DM Gem - I updated the rails_dm_datastore gem to enforce a singular kind name in datastore. This will allow developers to create hybrid apps that share models between Mirah/Dubious and Ruby/Rails. The rails-depot source shows the storage_names override.

Rails 2.3.8 - I updated the Rails 2.3.8 setup script. It now uses the most current gems for JRuby, JRuby-Rack and JRuby-OpenSSL. The setup script for Rails 2.3.5 has been removed.

RubyKaigi 2010 - Everyone had a blast at RubyKaigi. During JRubyKaigi, Takeru (@urekat) gave a fantastic presentation Rubyist, it's time to develop your Rails app on Google App Engine, and I gave a lightning talk on Extreme performance with Mirah and Dubious (slides). Takeru and I wanted to reach a broader audience, so we gave a quick talk at RejectKaigi called Mirah and Dubious (slides)

App Engine JA Night - On Aug 30th, Charles and I went to Google's Tokyo office for App Engine JA Night to give a presentation on Mirah and Dubious. Special thanks to Kazunori Sato and the DevRel team in Tokyo for setting this up.

Google App Engine 0.0.15 gems released

2010-07-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

We recently released the 0.0.15 google-appengine gem. The big change with this release was the introduction of app.yaml for configuration. John Wang also added OAuth support to our APIs.

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.15
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.5
App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.11
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.18
JRuby 1.5.1 and JRuby-OpesSSL 0.7 support

Developers should be advised that future versions of the SDK will require that app.yaml be inside WEB-INF, but the tools will probably move it there for you.

JRuby-Rack 1.0.2 - Nick Sieger released a new version of JRuby-Rack in early August. This included a patch by Patrick Cheng that fixes an annoying bug that made it difficult to deploy hybrid apps. With the latest gem, JRuby and Mirah apps play well together.

Rails 2.3.8 - I updated the old guide to point to a Rails 2.3.8 primer, that uses app.yaml. It is also a hybrid app, the same data is accessed by Rails and Dubious. Check out the source to see how it works.

OSCON Session - Charles Nutter and I gave a talk about "Ruby and Mirah on App Engine" at OSCON in July. This talk was well received, and there was a great deal of interest in Mirah. Paul Krill, from InfoWorld, wrote up this article, "Mirah brings Ruby niceties to Java".

Google Tech Talk - Charles came to Google to talk about "Expressive Languages on the JVM". Charles dispels a few myths about Ruby, and goes on to show how Mirah trumps other JVM languages by avoiding runtime dependencies. I jump in at the very end to poke around the Dubious demo app.

JRuby Kaigi - Takeru Sasaki will be giving an App Engine talk "Rubyist, it's time to develop your Rails app on Google App Engine" at JRuby Kaigi. I'll be there too, giving a lightning talk on Mirah/Dubious.

Google App Engine 0.0.14 gems released

2010-06-12T05:54:00.000-07:00

We recently released the 0.0.14 google-appengine gem. This release will let developers set specific versions of jruby-jars or jruby-rack by simply updating the Gemfile. We also include the necessary API jars inside appengine-apis, so now bundler does all the work. Folks looking to experiment with Rails 3, can use the App Engine Java SDK along with warbler, or just create a custom build script.

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.14
App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.10
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.17
JRuby 1.5.1 and JRuby-OpesSSL 0.7 support

DataMapper 1.0 - David Masover released the dm-appengine 0.1 gem, which works with DataMapper 1.0. David and @dbussink were able to sync up at RailsConf, we look forward to more collaboration in the future. David also posted the the source from the cart demo app in his talk.

Haml Support - Nathan Weizenbaum also released a new haml gem with specific changes to support App Engine. We load gems from jar files, and File.expand_path can produce strange results. I know that many developers were depending on haml, we really appreciate all the effort @nex3 put into making this work.

Recent Articles - John Wang wrote an excellent article on GData on Rails on Google App Engine that adapts Jeff Scudder's recent GData Tutorial. Ikai Lan, also wrote up an excellent post on Using the bulkloader with Java App Engine.

Scaling Rails - We met Jose Cortinas at BofConf, and he agreed to help us create the JavaScript front-end for a JSON-emitting Duby app. To kick off our hackfest, @jacortinas gave a demo of the app he created. The index and show methods are handled from a static page, using jQuery and mustache.js, with the Duby servlet on the back-end. All other methods are still handled with Rails and DataMapper. The benefit of this configuration is that new instances can respond in a second, because GET requests completely bypass the JRuby runtime and the Rails stack.

Search with Lucene - Starting from Ikai's recent post, Sarah Allen created a lucene demo on App Engine. She presented at the hackfest as well, and even write up this wonderful post about full text search on app engine. The following day, @ultrasaurus presented the app at RailsConf, and gave a nice shout-out to the JRuby Team.

RailsConf Session - Ryan Brown and I were joined by David Masover for our talk, Scaling Rails on App Engine wih JRuby and Duby. We've come a long way in one year. We have real Rails apps in production, and the DataMapper adapter has elegant transaction support. I've posted the slides from our talk, which include David's excellent DataMapper examples.

Google App Engine 0.0.13 gems released

2010-05-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

We just released the 0.0.13 google-appengine gem. We published the latest App Engine SDK, and we're now using the jruby-jars gem published by the JRuby team. We also have some bug fixes to the appengine-apis gem, and the dm-appengine gem now supports Discriminators (single-table-inheritance):

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.13
App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.9
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.4
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.16

Currently, appengine-rack depends on jruby-jars 1.4.1, but we have a pre-release version that will allow you to install any version of JRuby you want (by specifying it in the Gemfile).

More Coming Soon - We found an obscure issue with JRuby 1.5.0 on App Engine, but we expect to see this addressed in JRuby 1.5.1. Folks that want to use jruby-openssl 0.7 will need to hold untill JRuby 1.5.1. In the next few days, I plan to publish guides for Rails 2.3.8 and pure-Java Nokogiri.

RailsConf Session - Ryan Brown and I will be giving a talk at RailsConf, "Scaling Rails on App Engine with JRuby and Duby". You won't believe how far we've come in one year. David Masover will be there to bring us up-to-speed on the work he's doing with the DataMapper adapter. We'll also share highlights from Google I/O, and review the App Engine product roadmap.

Hackfest at RailsConf - Google is sponsoring a Hackfest at RailsConf on June 9. We'll have food, drinks, and even some swag to give away. Ryan and I will be helping folks with Duby and JRuby on App Engine. Other Googlers will be on-hand to help folks with Apps Marketplace integration and we'll get folks signed-up beforehand to use Google Storage for Developers. More details to follow.

Google App Engine 0.0.12 gems released

2010-05-05T01:08:00.000-07:00

We just released the 0.0.12 google-appengine gem. We published the latest App Engine SDK, and did some cleanup on the tools to properly set ENV['RACK_ENV'] for Sinatra::Reloader. We also fixed some issues with threads hanging in the development console:

Both JRuby 1.4.1 and 1.5.0.dev are available
App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.12
App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.8
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.3.1
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.15

JRuby OpenSSL - Simply install our prerelease version of JRuby 1.5, and the latest jruby-openssl gem will work just fine. Folks that have been using an altered version of jruby-openssl 0.5.2 should update to jruby-openssl 0.7.

      sudo gem install google-appengine
      sudo gem install appengine-jruby-jars --pre

Contributions - Lots of great posts have been coming into the list recently. John Wang wrote up a nice blog post on generating JSON on Rails. Stefan Michaelis just wrote up a detailed gist on custom Authentication and Authorization.

Local Meetup - Around 100 local Rubyists attended the App Engine Meetup last night. I presented summary slides form developers in Hawaii, Taiwan and Greece, and dissected a Rails application. Right after the meetup, Sarah Allen wrote up this fantastic blog post. I've also made my presentation available.

Conferences - We're excited about a couple upcoming conferences. On Thursday I'll be at the Red Dirt RubyConf, I'll lead off the Servers/Hosting theme with a talk on JRuby on Google App Engine. A couple weeks later is Google I/O, we expect to hear some exciting announcements about App Engine. Those attending won't want to miss What's hot in Java for App Engine.

Google App Engine 0.0.11 gems released

2010-04-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

We recently released the 0.0.11 google-appengine gem. We published the latest App Engine SDK, and now use bundler to fetch the jruby-rack gem. The latest App Engine APIs include bug fixes for memcache and HTTPS, and we pushed a new DM adapter with some experimental new features:

App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.7 and now includes
deferred dispatcher and depends on JRuby-Rack 0.9.7 gem
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.2
App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.14
DM Adapter updated to version 0.0.8

Reliable Spin-up - Our biggest show-stopper has been apps not consistently initializing within 30 seconds. Thankfully, @urekat came up with a simple solution to mitigate this problem, using redirects to break-up loading requests. We've packaged the deferred dispatcher with appengine-rack for your convenience.

JRuby Updates - A new version of Warbler was just release, we hope to take advantage of some of the new features for our Rails 3 setup process. We also expect to see a release candidate of JRuby 1.5 any day now, and jruby-openssl 0.6.1 should follow.

OAuth & OpenID - Thanks to some hard work from @ribrdb and @nahi, the jruby-openssl 0.6.1 gem will work properly on App Engine. The lack of a released gem has not stopped some developers from forging ahead. You should wait for jruby-openssl 0.6.1, but here are a couple examples from @azazeal and @baroquebobcat that use an altered gem to support OAuth and OpenID.

Nokogiri Java Port - As @headius has recently reported, the pure-Java version is very close to 100% passing. Thanks to an epic effort from Sergio Arbeo, Patrick Mahoney, Yoko Harada and others. It looks like they'll push it over the edge very soon.

App Engine Birthday - App Engine had a second birthday last week, and App Engine for Java is now only one year old. JRuby developers should be very excited with the recently published product roadmap. There was also an interesting TechCrunch article today.

Success Stories - A recent tweet from @app engine links to a blog post about Starting your business in less than a week with Rails on App Engine. The app runs Rails 2.3.5 with DataMapper on App Engine. The timing was just right when @azazeal started building his app, and he was determined to push through any issues. We also have a lot of utility apps like jruby-ci, so if you've been on the fence, consider using App Engine for your next Ruby app.

Google App Engine 0.0.10 gems released

2010-02-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

We just released the 0.0.10 google-appengine gem. Working with cron.yaml has been fixed with the latest version of App Engine Tools. We also include AppEngine SDK 1.3.1. I've posted a few more examples. I show how to configure ActionMailer, special thanks to Michael Rykov. I also show how to work with a gem that doesn't have the java extensions in a jar.

App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.10
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.1

We've also published a gem that includes JRuby 1.5.dev from head. People that have been having issues lately, especially with Rails, should try installing this gem:

        sudo gem install appengine-jruby-jars --pre

Our video from RubyConf, Scaling on App Engine with Ruby and Duby, has finally been posted. Also, JRuby commits can now be tracked at @jrubyci thanks to @koichiroo: http://jruby-ci.appspot.com

Works with bundler08, and JRuby-Rack 0.9.7. We had some great demos published recently:

Live Chat Demo and Using Image Upload by Trung Pham
Using The Images Service by Brian Gibson

Google App Engine 0.0.9 gems released

2010-01-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

We just released the 0.0.9 google-appengine gem. This new version of App Engine Tools addresses a previous issue with JRuby-Rack and facilitates bundling gems with Java extensions. I've created a couple sample apps, that use some common gems.

Later today, during the "Google Appengine Java: Groovy baby!" talk at Jfokus in Stockholm, Peter Lind will be giving a presentation about JRuby on AppEngine.

Google App Engine 0.0.8 gems released

2010-01-21T21:25:00.000-08:00

We recently released the 0.0.8 google-appengine gem. This new version of App Engine Tools is compatible with the latest version of Gem Bundler. We also added support for Rails 2.3.5 by including JRuby-Rack 0.9.6. Unfortunately, there is an incompatibility with App Engine, but we'll have a new release to fix this very soon. You can fix it from your app directory like so:

cd app_dir
curl -sO http://jruby-primer.appspot.com/tools/fix008.rb
ruby fix008.rb

We have had a great deal of community contribution recently. We assumed Rails 2 would not work without rubygems, so we were waiting for Rails 3. Fortunately, Takeru Sasaki was able to patch the Rails 2.3.5 calls to rubygems, and now we have it working. Rails 2.3.5 currently spins up several seconds faster than Rails 3, and just a few seconds behind Sinatra.

Takeru also created a datastore adapter called TinyDS. I created a TinyDS integration plugin that handles ActiveRecord method calls. Josh Moore also created a DM integration plugin, so now we have both adapters working effortlessly with Rails 2.3.5 generated scaffold.

Google App Engine 0.0.7 gems released

2009-12-23T03:17:00.000-08:00

We recently released the 0.0.7 google-appengine gem, with support for the latest App Engine SDK and Gem Bundler. We also have new versions of App Engine APIs, and the DataMapper adapter now supports the NOT_EQUAL and IN operators.

We also published JRuby on App Engine and Introducing Duby to YouTube. Duby is a new language with Ruby-inspired syntax, that compiles directly to Java bytecode. Ryan Brown explains why Duby is especially powerful for App Engine development.

This release includes updates to the following packages:

App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.0
App Engine APIs gem updated to version 0.0.12
App Engine tools gem now works with Bundler 0.7.2
DM Adapter gem updated to version 0.0.7

Google App Engine 0.0.6 gems released

2009-12-02T03:14:00.000-08:00

We recently released the 0.0.6 google-appengine gem, hot on the heels of our talks at RubyConf and JRubyConf. We finally got Rails 3.0.pre running, with a lot of help from Yehuda Katz. Check out the Rails Primer for instructions.

We also have some new sample code, like Brian Gibson's Using the Images Service demo Trung Pham's Using Image Upload.

This release includes updates to the following packages:

App Engine SDK updated to version 1.2.8

Better support for precompilation.

App Engine APIs gem updated to version 0.0.11

Includes ImageScience compatible Image API.

App Engine Tools gem updated to version 0.0.6

Better support for custom MIME types
Works with Bundler 0.7.1 and Rails 3.0.pre

Google App Engine 0.0.5 gems released

2009-11-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

We're excited to release the 0.0.5 google-appengine gem. The main focus of this release is on performance. If you've used Ruby on App Engine you know that the biggest pain point is start up time. Traditional Ruby app servers are designed to load everything your app could possibly need into memory, before responding to incoming requests. This model works with the assumption that machines are pre-allocated and can sit idle waiting for traffic. With App Engine, instances of your app spin up or down as needed to meet the given load at any time. This means that your applications require less CPU because less is idle, but it also means your app initializes new instances far more frequently. Whenever this happens, the first request seems to hang, potentially for many seconds, as the application initializes. We've made a few changes to make this less painful:

Gem Bundler - Loading RubyGems takes several seconds, so we've dropped support for RubyGems. Instead we're using the lighter-weight Gem Bundler. Instead of the `appcfg.rb gem` command, you now use a Gemfile. We generate a skeleton one for you, so just add your dependencies and you're good to go. Versions of Rails that require RubyGems are no longer compatible with these tools, but we expect to have Rails 3.0.pre working shortly.

Precompilation - This is a new, experimental feature of the Java runtime. The Java classes (i.e. JRuby) in your app are precompiled for App Engine when you deploy your app instead of during your request. This means the JRuby runtime should start up several seconds faster. This is a beta feature, so you may need to disable it if you have problems with deployment. See the config.ru in the Sinatra demo for an example of using this option.

Hybrid Apps - You've always been able to add Java Servlets and Filters to your config.ru to serve part of your app. Previously these handlers would have to wait for JRuby to initialize before they could serve a request. We've tweaked the web.xml we output so that these servlets can now run immediately. So you can write speed critical parts of your app (perhaps a homepage or some simple AJAX request handler) inServlets. In addition to traditional Java Servlets, you can also use Duby. Duby is a new language that shares the Ruby syntax, but compiles to Java bytecode. Charles Nutter covered Duby in his Ruby Mutants session at the Strange Loop Conference. Ryan Brown has been adding features to Duby and has a created a sample App Engine Duby app. As with Java Servlets, Duby Servlets are available right away, without the painful delay associated with spinning up a new instance of the JRuby Runtime.

This release also includes updates to a number of the included packages:

JRuby updated to version 1.4.0
App Engine SDK updated to version 1.2.6

Includes incoming email support.

App Engine APIs gem updated to version 0.0.10

Bas Wilbers contributed an ImageScience compatible Image API.

DM Adapter gem updated to version 0.0.6

Now supports all native Datastore types.
Associations have hopefully been fixed.

We'd like to thank all the early adopters for forging ahead, despite problems like the spin up delays. We'd also like to thank the users that have been contributing documentation, especially Maksym Parkachov for figuring out how to get the Rack::Reloader to work with Sinatra, and contributing documentation.

Upcoming Conferences

2009-09-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

We're looking forward to a few conferences later this year. I'll be giving a talk at Aloha on Rails in October, called "Ship Your App in a Container". I'll talk about our tools, and show how to plug in existing Java code. Lots of other great speakers will be there, it should be a lot of fun.

Rib Rdb and I will also be giving a talk at RubyConf in November, called "Scaling on App Engine with Ruby and Duby". We'll have some exciting updates to share, and I'll try to demo the things most people have been asking to see, like generating an app with scaffold, building some associations, etc.

I will be giving a talk at JRubyConf called "JRuby on Google App Engine". I'll have App Engine demos that show some cool Java/JRuby tricks. We are very excited to take part in this first ever JRubyConf. Kudos to Engine Yard for making this happen.

Google App Engine 0.0.4 gems released

2009-09-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

We've just released version 0.0.4 of the google-appengine and dm-appengine gems. This is a bug fix release: - appcfg.rb run should work again.

dev_appserver should now work with paths other than .
running dev_appserver.rb with no arguments prints help again.
dm-appengine should work with the latest dm-core gems.

We still haven't had time to track down how to fix associations in dm-appengine. Someone had suggested a patch, but it no longer works. If anyone can help track this down we'd be greatly appreciated.