New JRuby Syntax for Importing Java Classes

We've added a cleaner, simpler syntax to JRuby for including Java classes into a given namespace. It stemmed from a response of mine to a user on the JRuby mailing lists, and has been committed to trunk already. Almost everyone on the list agreed this new syntax is better.
Tom...
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2006-10-04 03:44:00 +0000

Ola Bini Joins JRuby Development Team

We're proud and excited to announce that Ola Bini has officially joined the JRuby development team. Ola has proven to be one of the most valuable community contributors to JRuby, and he's shown that he's dedicated to making Ruby on the JVM a reality. He's the sole creator of the...
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2006-10-03 23:41:00 +0000

Performance Progress Since 0.9.0

I love comparing current trunk against 0.9.0. It always makes me happy.
Here are the numbers for a local gem install rake. The second set of numbers is trunk plus a ThreadContext-passing experimental patch I'm working on. Without my experimental patch, trunk benchmarks about four seconds slower...
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2006-09-30 05:50:00 +0000

More People Who Get It

There's been some good blogging lately related to dynamic languages and their future in a Java-based world. I'm glad there's smart folks out there who really get it; the JVM is a great piece of engineering, and the Java platform is as rich and feature-complete as anything out there. Combined...
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2006-09-28 23:52:00 +0000

Why Add Syntax When You Have Ruby?

A question came up this morning on the JRuby Users mailing list about a feature Jython and Groovy support: constructors that initialize bean attributes. The example given used a JLabel:
JLabel(text, bounds = bounds, foreground = color)Which ends up being roughly equivalent to:...
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2006-09-28 11:10:00 +0000

RailsConf Europe 2006: JRuby Slides and Demo Posted

I have posted my slides and demo on headius.com at the following URLs. The demo has some very basic instructions for getting it to work, but I don't plan to support this code in any way. It was fairly hacked together in the days before the conference, so you're on...
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2006-09-23 15:20:00 +0000

Conference Updates

Ok, so this post is as much for me as for you (so I have a post to refer back to) but some of you may be interested to know what conferences I'll be at. Things have gotten a bit busier since the Sun announcement.
BarCamp Milwaukee - September 30...
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2006-09-17 23:35:00 +0000

A Taste of Celebrity...and Pizza

I'm still decompressing a bit after a great conference and 14 hours of transit from London to San Jose, but blogs are starting to trickle in about RailsConf. Here's a particularly notable entry.
I'm still not entirely sure why he wanted a picture of me with his (girl)friend. Maybe it's...
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2006-09-17 07:12:00 +0000

JRuby Get-Together Tonight in London

Yes, today is the day! We will be getting JRubyists together at the Fitzroy near the RailsConf conference center.
Here's a gmap to the Fitzroy. Show up around 6:30-7:00PM and I'll be there!...
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2006-09-15 08:33:00 +0000

More FAQs about JRuby and Sun

There's been a lot of buzz about Tom and my new jobs at Sun, and understandably so. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we're grateful for that. It's all very exciting.
There have been a few questions to come up again and again on blog postings and...
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2006-09-08 06:45:00 +0000

JRuby Steps Into the Sun

It's going to be a big news day for JRuby :)
The two core JRuby developers, myself and Thomas Enebo, will become employees at Sun Microsystems this month. Our charge? You guessed it...we're being hired to work on JRuby full-time...
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2006-09-07 16:39:00 +0000

More ActiveRecord Information

Supporting More Databases
A number of folks have asked about support for database X. We want to support all possible databases, of course, and JDBC gives us a huge head start on that. Many databases will only need a bit of tweaking to support all the basic CRUD operations. The...
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2006-09-04 18:31:00 +0000

Java Regex Broken for Alternation over Large Strings

This is a serious bummer.
I've been working through some of Rails's test cases this evening. Since I've got Depot running reasonably well now and I know I can easily wire together a simple Rails app that calls Hibernate or EJBs, I figured I'd try to get a better handle...
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2006-09-04 05:03:00 +0000

Using the ActiveRecord-JDBC Adapter

Ola Bini, Nick Sieger, and others have been making great progress on the ActiveRecord-JDBC adapter lately. I figure it's a good time for a brief update on progress, and a short walkthrough on how to use it.
Where We Are, Where We're Going...
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2006-09-03 23:17:00 +0000

From Eclipse to NetBeans: Part 3

I got a lot of good tips from NetBeans developers and users about how to resolve some of the issues I ran into. A number of them, as I mostly expected, were related to my running a beta that's still under development. Others are resolved via modules and add-ins (that...
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2006-09-02 23:23:00 +0000

Performance: Block Variables Breakdown

In response to my previous blog, Chris Nokleberg noted that if we're using String#equals a lot, interning will have an additional benefit...namely because String#equals short-circuits if both String objects are ==. I had forgotten about that benefit, so I thought I'd poke around for places it might have an effect.<br...
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2006-09-01 04:33:00 +0000

Performance: Inlining Strings

A while ago, we decided to inline all appropriate symbolic strings as they entered the AST. This appeared to help performance a measurable amount, presumably for two reasons:
The AST would take up less space in the long term Since Strings cache their hashcodes, having each identical string in the...
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2006-09-01 02:08:00 +0000