TorqueBox 2.10 comes with new leadership and JDK workarounds

The TorqueBox project's leader, Bob McWhirter, has stepped down from leading the development of the platform designed to run Ruby on Rails applications on JBoss's Application Server. McWhirter has led the project for the past four years, but has now become "Director of Polyglot for JBoss", a role that gives him more responsibilities within Red Hat. His place will be taken by Ben Browning, an existing core contributor to the project; Browning is said to have been unofficially driving the project for the last few months and "now – it's just official".

The announcement of the change of leadership came as part of the TorqueBox 2.1.0 release announcement. The new TorqueBox release uses a later version of JBoss Application Server 7 (AS7) which resolves a number of clustering related bugs. It also sees changes in the default clustering modes and in the naming of the inject method (now renamed to fetch), and adds support for the $JRUBY_OPTS environment variable and configurable timeouts for scheduled jobs.

One change of note is that InvokeDynamic support in JRuby has been disabled by default in TorqueBox. This support normally speeds up the execution of dynamic languages but has apparently been disabled because of a bug in JDK7 which results in NoClassDefFoundError being raised.The developers say this workaround is "a temporary measure" while they wait for a fixed JDK7 to be released. The developers are hoping to move to a monthly release cycle to roll fixes out more regularly and are planning 2.2.0 for the end of October; beyond there they say the roadmap is "sketchy".

Since last month, TorqueBox is being supported by Red Hat, albeit as a Technical Preview in the Web Framework Kit. The supported version is an older version that runs on JBoss EAP6. TorqueBox 2.1.0 is licensed under the LGPL and is available to download, along with manuals and other documentation, from the project's site.

(djwm)