I posted this to the Gitter page in case anyone wants to engage in a real-time discussion, but thought I'd follow up with an email to the mailing list as well. With that brief introduction, here's the question:
Recently, several issues have been opened that all tie back to whether or not we should continue to support JRuby as a deployment platform for Hanlon. Originally, we were using JRuby to support the buildout of a WAR file containing Hanlon that could easily be deployed to a standard app server or servlet engine (like Apache Tomcat), but since then we've moved away from that and are now building a Docker container that can be used to deploy Hanlon instead.
Continuing to support JRuby places limits on the gems we can use in Hanlon to just those with no native extensions. Originally that meant that we could not use the 'bson_ext' gem (resulting in an innocuous but annoying error message Hanlon's CLI output) and that we had to switch from the 'pg' gem to the 'jdbc-postgres' gem for use with our postgresql driver, which might not sound like a big deal but, to tell you the truth, we still don't have a pull request in (after almost a year) to switch that driver over to use the 'jdbc-postgres' gem instead (so our support for using PostgreSQL as a backend database is almost certainly broken). More recently, we added a dependency on the 'mkmf' gem to Hanlon to access a method provided by that gem that searches for an executable on the system. We use that method to determine if we should use the 'ifconfig' or 'ip' command to gather network information when setting up the Hanlon server configuration, and we had no issues when running Hanlon as a Rackup application (either on a host or in a Docker container); unfortunately, we introduced another native dependency when we made that change...
So, with that background, here's the question to the group:
Should we continue to support JRuby and deployment of Hanlon as a WAR file (and continue to make modifications to Hanlon to remove these sorts of native dependencies) or should we stop trying to support JRuby as a platform and just live with the fact that we are no longer deploying Hanlon as a WAR file? Thoughts?
