From: Tim Pease <tim.pease@...>
Date: 2007-01-11T08:09:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Threading nightmare

On 1/10/07, Thiago Jackiw <tjackiw@gmail.com> wrote:
> The scenario (for test purposes) I'm trying to accomplish when running
> rake on a new Rakefile is:
>
> 1) start a java server (which doesn't have an option to 'daemonize'
> it) and get its pid
> 2) interact with the server by sending things or accessing it
> 3) stop the server
>
> I've tried using IO's popen, fork, thread, even sending the server to
> /dev/null when starting it but none of them work as I expected. Once
> the server (step 1) starts it just hangs in there, not letting the
> following steps to run. But if I kill the server (control+c) the step
> 2 tries to run and fails because the server is no longer running.
>

If you're on a non-Windows system, then you can use Ara's "slave" gem.

Check out Ara's "systemu" gem as well -- although I do not think it
allows you to send information to the forked process.

Blessings,
TwP