JRuby-on-Rails and MySQL on GlassFish on OpenSolaris in Virtual Box VM

My primary development machine is Mac OS Leopard on Intel Core 2 Duo (read osxtips). But the beauty of virtualization is that I can run multiple Operating Systems on a single powerful machine. And what better virtualization product than Virtual Box. And  Open Solaris has crossed leaps and boundaries making installation and getting started extremely simple :)

So here is an application stack that I tried:

Rails 2.1 + My SQL 5.0.51a JRuby 1.1.2 GlassFish v3 TP2 OpenSolaris 2008.05 Virtual Box 1.6.2 Mac OSX Leopard Intel 2.4 G Hz Core 2 Duo

You can easily deploy your Rails applications using MySQL database on GlassFish installed on OpenSolaris in a Virtual Box VM on Mac OS Leopard running on an Intel 2 Duo processor machine. Overall a happy experience :)

The complete instructions to install OpenSolaris using Virtual Box are very useful.

Here are basic steps ...

Create a new VM (settings given in the instructions):



Once all the options are chosen, the generated VM settings are shown as below:



Booting the Virtual Machine from the Live CD shows the following GRUB:



Pick the default options (GRUB, Keyboard & Language) and then the following default screen is shown:



Read and Close the license screen. And then click on the "Install Open Solaris" icon to continue the installation process. This step is important otherwise you'll keep booting from LiveCD every time (I messed up on this few times ;).



After choosing the Region, Location & Timezone and taking other defaults, the summarized installation options are shown:



And finally the installation is complete:



After the installation is complete, shutdown the VM by either selecting "System, Shut Down..." or click on the X on the VM window and selecting "Power off the machine". Change the boot sequence order to bring "Hard Disk" at the top by clicking on "Settings", "Advanced" tab and changing the order as shown below.



And finally, you can easily deploy a Rails 2.1 application on this newly configured machine as explained in Rails 2.1 on GlassFish.  TOTD #35 explains how Rails Database connection need to be configured on Solaris.
The final output of the application looks like:




Here are some pointers for you to get started:

• Virtual Box 1.6.2
• OpenSolaris 2008.05
• GlassFish v3 TP2
• JRuby 1.1.2
• Rails powered by the GlassFish Application Server

Did you know the 3 keywords for GlassFish v3 - Modularity (OSGi compliant), Extensiblity (non-Java apps) & Emebeddability (runs in-VM) ? Read more on GlassFish v3 main page.

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