Amazon this week announced Elastic Beanstalk, a managed Apache Tomcat service for AWS. Naturally, I had to try JRuby on it.
First, the bad:AWSEB is really slow to deploy stuff. Several times it got "stuck" and I waited for more than 30 minutes for it to recover. It did not...

JRuby is an implementation of Ruby, and in order to achieve the high level of compatibility we boast we've had to put in some extra work. Probably the biggest area is in management of String data.
Strings in Ruby 1.8...

Sometimes it's the little things that make all the difference in the world.
For a long time, we've extolled the virtues of the amazing JVM tool ecosystem. There's literally dozens of profiling, debugging, and monitoring tools, making JRuby perhaps the best Ruby tool ecosystem you can get. But there's a...

Another present for you JRubyists out there!
JRuby has had notoriously bad startup times. Not as bad as, say, IronRuby (sorry guys!), but definitely a big fat hit every time you need to run some Ruby code from the command line. Some of this overhead was related to JRuby, and...

This should be a great Christmas present for many of you.
After over three years, the "ruby-debug" gem finally installs properly on JRuby...

This was going to be a reply to a friend on Twitter, when I realized it would be several tweets and I might as well put them in one place.
Grant Michaels (@grantmichaels) sent me this link to the October JCP (Java Community Process) EC (Expert Committee) meeting notes. The...

(This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2004, which I stumbled upon this evening and thought worthy of a reprint. Feel free to rip it up and offer your own commentary. I think it is still 100% valid.)
I came up with the most compelling idea for...

As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this...

As part of the Ruby Summer of Code, Tim Felgentreff has been building out C extension support for JRuby. He's already made great progress, with simple libraries like Thin and Mongrel working now and larger libraries like RMagick and Yajl starting to function. And we haven't even reached the mid-term...

This is the third post in a series. The first two were on Browsing Memory the JRuby Way and Finding Leaks in Ruby Apps with Eclipse Memory Analyzer
Hello again, friends! I'm back with more exciting memory analysis tips and tricks! Ready? Here we go!...

After my post on Browsing Memory the JRuby Way, one commenter and several other folks suggested I actually show using Eclipse MAT with JRuby. So without further ado...
The Eclipse Memory Analyzer, like many Eclipse-based applications, starts up with a "for dummies" page linking to various actions...

There's been a lot of fuss made lately over memory inspection and profiling tools for Ruby implementations. And it's not without reason; inspecting a Ruby application's memory profile, much less diagnosing problems, has traditionally been very difficult. At least, difficult if you don't use JRuby.
Because JRuby runs on the...

I mused today on Twitter that there's just a few small things that the JVM/JDK need to become a truly awesome platform for all sorts of development. Since so many people asked for more details, I'm posting a quick list here. There's obviously other things, but these are the ones...

There's lots of ways to present RESTful web services these days, and REST has obviously become the new "it's IPC no it's not" hotness. And of course Rubyists have been helping to lead the way, building restfulness into just about everything they write. Rails itself is built around REST, with...

We've often talked about the benefit of running on the JVM, and while our performance numbers have been *good*, they've never been as incredibly awesome as a lot of people expected. After all, regardless of how well we performed when compared to other Ruby implementations, we weren't as fast as...

I originally started to send this to the JRuby dev list and to the Ruboto list, but realized quickly that it might make a good blog post. Since I don't blog enough lately, here it is.
I've been looking into better ways to precompile Ruby code to classes for deploy...

One of the most commonly used native extensions for Ruby is the Nokogiri XML API. Nokogiri wraps libxml and has a fair amount of C code that links directly against the Ruby C extension API...an API we don't support in JRuby (and won't, without a lot of community help).
A...

Hello again!
As you may know, I've been working part-time on a new language called Duby. Duby looks like Ruby, since it co-opts the JRuby parser, and includes some of the features of the Ruby language like optional arguments and closures. But Duby is not Ruby; it's statically typed, compiles...

JRuby 1.5 will be released soon, and one of the coolest new features is the integration of Ant support into Rake, the Ruby build tool. Tom Enebo wrote an article on the Rake/Ant integration for the Engine Yard blog, which has lots of examples of how to start migrating to...

This year, no major Ruby organization got accepted to Google's Summer of Code (even though a half dozen Python projects got accepted, but I won't rant here). What do we as Rubyists do? Take it sitting down? NO! We make our own Summer of Code!
Thanks to Engine Yard, Ruby...