Migrating my heroku/postgres project to Jruby

A little inspired by all the JRuby buzz, I thought I’d take an existing rails app that I have running on heroku and migrate it to Jruby. I wanted to test how easy/hard it would be:

1. I made a branch of my project:

   git checkout -b jruby-test

2. Install jruby via rvm

   rvm install jruby-1.6.2

3. I editted my .rvmc to use Jruby instead of MRI, from:

   rvm use 1.9.2@proj

   to

   rvm use jruby-1.6.2@proj-jruby

4. I updated my rmvc from :

   rvm use 1.9.2@proj

   to

   rvm use jruby-1.6.2@proj-jruby

5. I edited my Gemfile. This is where I knew it would get tricky.
   1. Removed:

      gem 'pg'

   2. Added:

      gem 'activerecord-jdbc-adapter'
      gem 'activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter'
      gem 'jdbc-postgres'

   3. Found out hard way had to remove ruby-debug19. DUh, dude
   4. Texticle gem does not work. This makes sense because it is plugin to postgres ActiveRecord driver. However, I use this for my minimalistic search functionality.
6. Ran ‘rake spec’ on the project. My tests for the search feature failed as expected because of the missing Texticle dependency. I had one test that was failing on
   Regular expression. The regular expression looked like this:

   if last_item =~ /sector|leverage_point/

   When examined the code a bit, I found out that last_item was actually a symbol. I guess MRI automatically converts symbols to strings for Regular Expressions and JRuby does not. I changed the line to:

   if last_item.to_s =~ /sector|leverage_point/

   and it worked fine

7. Ran ‘rails s thin’ and my app was up and running.

Not bad for a JRuby amatuer. Although not having the Texticle gem is a show stopper on this project.
It’s not that Texticle is the best solution for search but we have some code written in it.