I had planned to post a "Part 1.5" that summarized all the emailed and commented help I got for my first post, but I've been too busy working on JRuby on Rails to try most of those suggestions out. Several folks offered a whole bundle of useful tips that will...

It's official! Travel arrangements are currently being made for me to attend and present at RailsConf Europe 2006 in London!
I had not expected to make it, so this comes as a bit of a surprise. I guess I need to put together some sort of presentation now, don't I?...

I am attempting to make the switch from Eclipse to NetBeans, and this is a raw dump of the pros and cons so far during that process. Note that these are not meant to question design decisions behind various NetBeans features; they are simply differences that have made the conversion...

We've been wrestling with parser speed this past week on the JRuby project, tweaking the lexer, fiddling with the grammar and parser generator, and micro-optimizing all the various support classes. None of those experiments have helped much; performance in each case improved by only a few percentage points.
We've also...

Ola Bini on Java, Lisp, Ruby and AI
As part of his series of JRuby "howto" articles, Ola has put together an outstanding walkthrough for getting Camping running under JRuby. It has all the trimmings, including ActiveRecord over JDBC. It took surprisingly little work for us to support in JRuby...

InfoQ: The Resurgence of Java the Platform
A prescient post from Scott Delap, InfoQ's newest Java editor. As you can probably guess, I also believe Java the platform is entering a renaissance with Sun's recent promise for the platform to be "multilingual" and projects like JRuby finally coming into their...

Digg: Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have observed growing interest in dynamic programming, and plan to integrate more extensive support for dynamic language features in their respective managed language platforms.
It's interesting to see this kind of article make it to the Digg front page. The links to the eWeek articles...

JRuby's performance has never been stellar. Even before the current performance-hindering refactoring and "correctification" work began, it was almost an order of magnitude slower than MRI ("Matz's Ruby Interpreter"). When I started working on my parts of the JRuby internal redesign, I knew thing were going to get worse before...

Currently, in order to implement a Java interface in JRuby, you extend from it like so:
require 'java'...

A new member of the JRuby community, Blane Dabney, submitted a patch for JRuby socket IO to resolve a DRb issue he'd been having. Our original implementation of a "write" method was not properly handling line terminators, and would end up blocking on write calls with nothing coming out the...

RubyConf*MI
I am registered for RubyConf*MI, though it's still uncertain if I'll attend. The registration cost is a measly $20, but it sounds like it will be a good time. Grand Rapids is about a 9-hour drive, however, so I'm looking for someone to share transportation with from Minneapolis. I...

Camping
After a minor fix provided by Ola Bini (thanks Ola!) we now have Camping running under JRuby, using the ActiveRecord JDBC adapter. According to Ola, Camping under JRuby seems to run very well, and feels very snappy. I'm going to be playing with it a bit soon, and may...

Ok, perhaps the blogosphere can help with this one. I've been trying to respond to an email from Tor Norbye at Sun Microsystems since Sunday. Unfortunately, my emails seem to be shuffled off into the ether. He sent another email to me today, saying he hasn't heard back from me.<br...

Some of the local Rubyists and I were talking about publishers for a future JRuby book...ligers were brought up...and, well, here's the result.
...

I haven't posted anything substantive in a while, but things are moving rapidly forward. Here's a quick summary of what's been going on with JRuby:
RubySpec...

Well now I've gone and done it.
Dear Charles,...

It's 2AM. The western world is asleep. Bats flit and chatter outside my urban Minnesota home, chasing mosquitos. My available television channels (only broadcast; I don't have cable) have been reduced to dating shows, infomercials, and evangelical fundraisers.
I'm up coding. Why?...

I love stirring up trouble. In working on the compiler for JRuby, it's become apparent that a few targetted areas could yield tremendous performance benefit even in pure-interpreted mode. I describe a bit of this evening's study here.
As an experiment, I cut out a bunch of the stuff in...

JavaPolis 2006 - Antwerp, Belgium
I have received confirmation from my employer, Ventera Corporation, that they will fund my trip to Antwerp. Hooray! I'm also planning on bringing my wife and spending the holiday season in Europe. It ought to be a great trip, right on the heels of presenting...

July 17 was a particularly big news day for JRuby. Three articles were posted, one in two places, on JRuby and the two core developers Tom and I. I present here a collection of articles and blogs that have particular significance to the Ruby+Java world.
Ruby for the Java worldJoshua...