I’ve been playing around with JRuby on Rails and Glassfish and really like the simplicity of deploying simple WAR files to a Glassfish server. Messing around with Apache configurations and managing a bunch of mongrel processes is just not my favorite pastime, plus I like to have the option of running other J2EE webapps on the same server, and interface my RoR app with existing Java libraries.
I ran into some problems trying to get the updatetool for Glassfish working on my VPS (at Rimuhosting) though. The updatetool is a Java Swing app and I’ve never run any GUI apps on this remote host before. It doesn’t have Gnome or KDE running so VNC was not an option. The trick is mostly just to set up your systems for running remote X11 applications over a SSH tunnel. Here’s how I got it to work…. I should say this server runs Ubuntu Hardy and locally I’m on Mac OS X so the X11 install from the Mac OS installation disks was the easy part.
Here’s what I had to do on the remote host: