The last post a good month and a half ago spoke about porting our revenue management product Jair to JRuby and deploying on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk.

Well, we’ve ported the app and apart from a few hiccups with gem versions not being supported in JRuby – we had to upgrade from the CSV to FasterCSV gem which I guess is no bad thing! – all went smoothly.

I really like JRuby as there’s something satisfying about writing in Ruby but deploying on to Tomcat. Even more satisfying is when the application actually runs up on Tomcat!

I’m not yet fully convinced as on shutdown Tomcat issues dire warnings about memory leaks being “likely to happen” but we’re going to do some application profiling soon so we’ll see.

Rather than use Elastic Beanstalk (only available in Amazon’s US regions at the moment) we just deployed on to a customised Bitnami Tomcat stack on AWS EC2. Again, this seemed a lot easier than the last time I tried although perhaps that’s down to having the right tools installed beforehand(!).

I’ve got a bunch of tips / things that we learned from the porting exercise and also AWS deployment so I’ll post those up in the next few days.

For us, AWS rather than GAEJ, is the way forward. Although there are different services on GAEJ (can only think of caching and IM offhand) so it could be useful for some apps, but how long before AWS offer the same? As well as that with AWS there is the freedom to install things like memcached etc.

I do feel a bit guilty though every day at 4p.m. when the True North chatbot (one of our apps on the Google App Engine) pings me on IM … maybe it’ll be its turn for porting next.