I've been a bit quiet on the blog over the past couple months, and for that I apologize. JRuby is moving very quickly now, and we'll have some pretty big announcements soon. For now, I figured I'd let my friends in Europe and the British Isles know I'll be in your back yard again soon!

I'm going to be speaking at the Irish Java Technologies Conference in January. The conference is the 7th and 8th, and I'll be doing two talks.

The first is going to be a talk on JRuby, with all the usual trimmings to show Ruby's power and the strength of the Ruby community and ecosystem at large. I'll give a brief intro to Ruby, and then do a few live-coded demonstrations of Ruby calling Java libraries.

The second talk will be on the future of the JVM and the Java platform in light of this renewed interest in alternative languages. I'll be discussion the challenges of implementing a language like JRuby, walking through some of the work we've done to make JRuby the fastest Ruby implementation. Then we'll dive into the future of languages like JRuby on the JVM, going through upcoming changes in Java 7 and talking about how they'll affect the average developer on the Java platform.

The second talk will be the first of it's kind I've ever presented, but it's a topic very dear to me. I think we have a responsibility to ensure that the JVM, especially OpenJDK, become the VM and platform of choice for all kinds of application development, and our work on JRuby is directly related to that goal. What we've learned from JRuby, and what others have learned implementing their languages, will directly affect the future of the platform.

So, if you're anywhere near Dublin around 7th-8th January, come on by the conference!