Things are moving along well...so well I've found time to reimplement String with byte[], work on closures in the compiler, and, well those are posts for another day. Today I update you on the progress of supporting Rails in JRuby.
Rails is quite an interesting beast. I've learned more about...

Last week Tim Bray and I were at Menlo Park to meet with the Open Source Software Society Shimane, a delegation of developers, managers, and company heads from the Shimane prefecture of Japan. They were visiting Sun to talk with us about opportunities for cooperation, Sun hardware and software, and...

My friends, the end of the road is in sight for official Rails support.
Tom, Ola, and I have been working over the past week to get remaining Rails issues wrapped up. As a result of our efforts:ActionPack is now "practically" 100% working, minus a test or two we can't...

I created JRUBY-501 to track performance improvements to Java integration, since it's come to light recently that it may be one of our biggest bottlenecks now. And I found a ripe, juicy fix already.
For every call to a Java type, we call JavaUtilities.matching_method with a list of potential methods...

Roundup!
Martin Fowler enjoys using JRuby with Velocity...

Times they are a-changing.
I posted previously on JRuby's compiler work. There have been various iterations of the compiler, many purely prototype and never intended to be completed, and a few genuine attempts at evolving toward full Ruby support. However I believe in the recent weeks I've settled on a...

Who knew writing a compiler could be so much fun.
I managed to accomplish two things tonight. It's late and I have a flight home tomorrow, so I'll be brief...

Tor, you sneaky devil. You tagged me before anyone else had a chance. You grabbed the brass ring. Kudos.
So to continue the "5 Things" meme (for the record, I really hate the word "meme"), I present for you five things you probably don't know about me. Actually, some of...

The headline says it all, really!
The TIOBE Programming Community Index measures language popularity based on "the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors" using the major search engines. It's not not a terribly scientific way to measure popularity, but I'm not sure anyone has a better...

I've been cranking away on the new compiler. I'm a bit tired and planning to get some sleep, but I've gotten the following working:
all three kinds of callslocal variablesstring, fixnum, array literals'def' for simple methods and arg listsclosuresNow that last item comes with a big caveat: I have no...

Over time I've become less convinced that hotswappable classes would be an absolute requirement for the proposed invokedynamic bytecode to be useful, and more convinced that there's a number of ways a dynamic language like Ruby or Groovy could utilize the new bytecode. This post gives a little background on...

Congratulations to the Groovy team on their release of Groovy 1.0! Groovy is another dynamic language for the JVM inspired by features in Smalltalk, Python, and of course Ruby. It's been a long time coming, and a lot of hard work involved, but Groovy 1.0 is finally here.
See the...

The team has grown again! After I asked the JRuby community to nominate a new team member, based on past code, mailing list, documentation, or other contributions, a number of folks thought Nick Sieger would be a good addition. And we agreed.
Nick is the original author of the ActiveRecord-JDBC...

Evan Phoenix (of Rubinius fame) were discussing dynamic dispatch today on #rubinius, sharing our caching strategies and our dispatch woes. We talked at length about various strategies for speeding dispatch, cache invalidation mechanisms, compilation techniques, and so on. All gloriously fun stuff.
So at one point I related to him...

This week (what's left of it) I'm spending on performance again. It's officially a holiday for Sun, so I'm not technically on the clock. I could even sleep the entire week and pick things back up on Tuesday.
Yeah, right...

There will be two JRuby talks at JavaPolis.
The first is part of the "University" sessions tomorrow. We're the middle hour of a three-hour bit on scripting languages for the JVM. During that session we're going to be focusing on practicalities like building a simple app, using IRB, and getting...

Another conference, another meetup!
JRuby JavaPolis Meetup...

Damian Steer, regular JRuby contributor, has taken the IRB applet and run with it. He's gotten readline working (history, line editing, tab-completion), added some fonts and colors to differentiate things, and even put in an intellisense-like menu for tab completion of method names.
...

Ashish Sahni has posted instructions for packaging a Rails app as a WAR on his blog, based on the work of a number of JRuby community members. I ran through his instructions, and have only two modifications to make:
When installing Rails, you still probably want to pass --no-ri --no-rdoc...

Tor Norbye is a programming machine on par with the legendary Ola of Bini. He's the one-man force working on NetBeans Ruby support, and his progress has been epic. Here's his latest screenshot and a short blurb about it:
NetBeans + Ruby = True...