 | Level: Introductory Santhosh Krishnamoorthy (santhoshk@in.ibm.com), Staff Software Engineer, IBM Software Labs, Bangalore
05 Jun 2008 The Ruby Java Bridge (RJB) lets you load Java™ classes directly
to, and call them from, Ruby on Rails applications. This tutorial shows how you can
put this toolkit to work by reusing your legacy Java Web application code in a modern Web development platform.
In this tutorial
Ruby on Rails (Rails) is a full-stack Web application framework written in Ruby — a feature-rich, free, simple, extensible, portable, object-oriented scripting language.
Rails has gained immense popularity among Web application developers. With it, you can
quickly and efficiently develop a Web application and deploy it into any Web
container, such as IBM® WebSphere® or Apache Tomcat. Before Rails and similar Web application development frameworks were available, the de
facto standard tool for the job was the Java language, thanks to its platform
independence and comprehensive API set. Many Java Web applications are still running, resulting in the ready availability of much useful, well-written Java code (loosely referred to in this tutorial as legacy code). Legacy Java code is usually packaged as a set of JAR files. If you change your Web application development platform to Rails, you can reuse legacy Java code. The Ruby Java Bridge (RJB) is a toolkit that lets you load JAR files into your Rails application and access the methods and variables in them. This tutorial explains how to configure and use RJB in a Rails application.
Objectives - Download, compile, and install RJB
- Set up RJB to access shared Java libraries
- Load and access legacy Java code in a Rails application
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes basic familiarity with the Java language, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails.
System requirements
This tutorial assumes that you are working on a Linux® system. (However, the
steps are essentially the same for Windows®.) It also assumes that you have a
working setup of Ruby on Rails. If not, the tutorial Resources has links to documentation that can help you install and configure Rails for your system. RJB requires that you have a Java SDK installed on your system. If you need to, download the latest Java SE SDK for your platform and install it now.
To view the demos included in this tutorial, JavaScript must be enabled in your browser and Macromedia Flash Player 6 or higher must be installed. You can download the latest Flash Player at http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer/.
Duration
1 hour
Formats html, pdf
| | | |
