And it's out the door! We are currently sending out the announcement: JRuby 0.9.0 is released!

Any frequent readers out there will know there's a ton of improvements in this release. I'll be blogging a bit later on the details of each, but here's a short list:

• All non-native Ruby libraries (lib/ruby/1.8 from the C version) are included in this release, so you can download, unpack, and hit the ground running. No installing, no copying files, no fuss.
• RubyGems 0.9.0 (coincidence?) is included pre-installed with appropriate scripts to run with JRuby. Gems install beautifully, but I'd recommend you use --no-rdoc and --no-ri until we get a few performance issues worked out (doc generation is still pretty slow).
• WEBrick finally runs and can serve requests. This also allows the Rails 'server' script to server up your Rails apps. Speaking of Rails...
• Ruby on Rails now runs most scripts and many simple applications out-of-the-box. The 1.1.4 release of Rails included our patch for block-argument assignment, eliminating an unsupported (by JRuby) and unusual syntax preventing scripts from running. We've also improved performance a bit and as mentioned before, got the WEBrick-based 'server' script running well.
• YAML parsing, StringIO, and Zlib are now Java-based instead of the original pure-Ruby implementations. This has greatly improved the performance of RubyGems and other libraries/apps that make use of these libraries. There are a few libraries remaining to be "nativified" and we expect to get future performance benefits from doing so.
  
• As always, there are a large number of interpreter, core, and library fixes as part of this release.

This release represents another huge leap forward beyond our JavaOne demo. Where Rails was a bit touchy and unpredictable with that release, it's now becoming very usable. Where RubyGems only half-worked before, it now appears to work well every time. We feel we're on track for full Rails support by the end of this summer, with a JRuby 1.0 release to follow. Thanks all for your support and assistance!

Special thanks to JRuby contributors Ola Bini and Evan Buswell for their work on YAML/Zlib reimplementation and server sockets, respectively. We wouldn't have RubyGems or WEBrick working without their contributions.

• Information about JRuby and the release can be found at jruby.org.
• The release archives are on SourceForge. This will be the last release from SourceForge; we are in the process of moving to CodeHaus and should be up and running there shortly!

Stay tuned for a JRuby on Rails walkthrough!