Boing

Boing is a preloader-aware command runner for JRuby. It builds off the preload capabilities of Drip and adds per-command smarts for specific commands.

Boing is being created in response to the Spring preloader being supported by Rails 4.1. Spring preloads Ruby/Rails instances in the background in much the same way as JRuby can do with Drip, but does it using forking. Because JRuby already has Drip, Boing should only need to know how to safely preload and reload the application.

Similar to Spring commands can be run with Boing using the format

boing <command>

Most commands will just run directly, with the assumption that they are already in a preloaded JVM. (Boing will warn if used outside of a preloaded JVM). Some Rails commands, however, will be run directly.

However, boing is also aware of a few rails commands that can be run directly using a specific dripmain.rb preload script. Boing can generate this script using boing dripmain.

Finally, all background instances can be cleaned up with boing killall, which is equivalent to the drip kill command from Drip.

Note that there's a more work to do here and much more that Boing could do to improve startup and application development interactivity.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'boing'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install boing

Usage

To run a command in a preloaded VM:

boing <command>

To generate a dripmain.rb suitable for Rails:

boing dripmain

To kill all background VM instances:

boing killall

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request