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...

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...

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:...

Tom and I got together and brainstormed the interface implementation issue today. We think we've come up with a reasonably solid solution.
First some background...

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...

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...

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...

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!...

Pat Eyler has a good wrap up of some reactions around the Net to the recent Sun move...

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...

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...

I told you it would only be a couple days!
ActiveRecord 0.2 has been released. (It's actually 0.2.1 because of a minor Gem glitch)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

So here's the times and places. I want to get together JRubyists to just chat a bit at some point, and it seems like Thursday or Friday would work best. The only concrete suggestion so far is the Fitzroy Tavern on the 15th, around 6:30PM-7:00PM (thanks Damian). This works for...

Tim Bray tossed me a link to an IronPython screencast given by Jim Hugunin for Jon Udell.
On the surface, it does look fairly impressive. However I'm not impressed for the reasons some folks might be. So here's the notes I took while watching this demonstration...take them for what they're...