Think in code

Sometimes you meet that kind of people that complain about the lack of any feature in an open source project but they don't do anything to solve the problem. Last releases of Trinidad try the solve one of that complaints, so that people have one excuse less to use it :)

The goal of the project was pretty simple, allow to run a Rails application under Apache Tomcat without generating a war file in a more familiar "rails way". But that guy complained because he wanted to run several applications into the same instance of Tomcat, and actually he was partially right, Tomcat is a powerful application server and it can run several applications at once, thus, why don't allow to Trinidad to run several Rails applications?

After a few changes in its architecture, Trinidad allows to run as many Rails applications as Tomcat can support into the same instance. We just need add the application's context and their system path to the Trinidad's configuration file and run Trinidad with the option to read that file.

For instance, if we want to load three applications we had to add this nodes to the yaml file:

---
  :web_apps:
    :default:                                         # context path is '/'
      :web_app_dir: 'rails_apps/mock'
    :mock1:                                         # context path is '/mock1'
      :web_app_dir: 'rails_apps/mock1'
    :mock2:
      :web_app_dir: 'rails_apps/mock2'
      :context_path: '/mock2'

and run Trinidad with the configuration option:

$ jruby -S trinidad --config

That's it. Hope it will useful. Btw all the configuration options can be found in the Trinidad's wiki.

I just released a new version of Trinidad with two major features. The first one is that it supports ssl connections adding a simple starting option:

  $ trinidad --ssl

The second one is also related with connections, but this one is about AJP, a protocol designed to increase tomcat's performance, if you already have worked with tomcat or jboss I'm sure you already know it.

But what I'd like to show you is one of its main adventages, how to create a really stable load balancer with Apache httpd and Trinidad thanks to ajp.

First we have to ensure all the apache modules that we need are loaded:

  $ sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp proxy_balancer

After that, we have to configure our virtual host to proxy the connections through ajp, this is an actually basic configuration, there are a lot of resources about mod_proxy_balancer on internet:

<Proxy balancer://trini>
  BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8009
  BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8099
</Proxy>

ProxyPass / balancer://trini/

Notice that I'm using my development machine and that's why the two balancer members have the same ip but different port.

Finally, we have to run two different instances of Trinidad with the ajp option enabled, with the ports we specified in the balancer configuration (8009 is the default one), and different http ports due to I'm running it in my machine:

$ trinidad --port 3001 --ajp
$ trinidad --port 3002 --ajp 8099

That's it, quite straightforward.

By the way, I've also set up a google group where you can ask doubts or discuss about the development itself, and, as always, if you find a bug or have a new cool functionality you can add it to the issue tracker.