We previously posted how to run TorqueBox on Red Hat OpenShift Express but thought it was time to freshen things up a bit since OpenShift and TorqueBox have had several releases since then.
Services, Scheduled Jobs, Caching, and Messaging Support
The biggest change is you can now use TorqueBox services, scheduled jobs, caching and messaging on OpenShift with no extra setup required. This is a lot of functionality you get for free - free as in you didn't have to set it up, and free as in OpenShift costs you $0 to use these features.
Get Started
To help you get started, we've provided a polyglot-openshift-example repository that walks you through creating an AS7 application on OpenShift and then merging in the necessary changes to support TorqueBox applications. Take a moment to head over there and try it out for yourself. At the end you'll get to play a simple game of ping pong with messaging between Ruby and Clojure.
Assuming you followed the directions from the README.md in that repository, you've now deployed a Java application, a Ruby application, and a Clojure application (via Immutant) to a single AS7 instance running in OpenShift. That's three applications in three different languages all running in the same JVM on OpenShift. Mind blown yet?
The fun doesn't stop there. Want to deploy a second Ruby application
to this same TorqueBox instance? Just create a new directory next to
the ruby/ and clojure/ ones already present and place your code
inside of it, ensuring you have a torquebox.yml or
config/torquebox.yml inside the new directory with a unique web
context specified. Add the new files to git, git push, and watch
your new application be picked up and deployed to TorqueBox. We detect
the type of application from the contents of the directory, not from
the directory name. The sample applications are just named ruby and
clojure for simplicity.
Don't want the example Clojure app anymore? Just rm -r
clojure/. Don't want the example Java app? Just rm -r src and rm
pom.xml.
How many applications can you deploy to this TorqueBox server? I don't know - it all depends on the size of your applications and how much memory they ultimately consume. Give it a shot and let us know!
Don't forget that you can always start up a second TorqueBox server
with a separate URL by following the instructions in
polyglot-openshift-example again and passing different arguments to
rhc app create.
See the potential? How much money could you save on PaaS hosted applications by switching to TorqueBox and OpenShift?