JRuby has become notorious among Ruby implementations for having a slow startup time. Some of this is the JVM's fault, since it doesn't save JIT products and often just takes a long time to boot and get going. Some of this is JRuby's fault, though we work very hard to...

Like most geeks, I watched with great anticipation as the iPad was unveiled yesterday. In my case, it was from liveblogs monitored on spotty 3G and WiFi access at the Jfokus after-conference event. I'm reasonably impressed with the device, especially the $500 price point on the low end. But after...

(How long has it been since I last blogged? Answer: a long time. I'll try to blog more frequently now that the (TOTALLY INSANE) fall conference season is over. Remind me to never have three conferences in a month ever again.)
Hello friends! It's been a busy week! I thought...

This year, RubyConf reportedly reduced their attendee cap to 250 people (Update: actually 450 people), after hosting a 500 to 600-person conference last year. As you can imagine, this meant a lot of people that wanted to attend were not able to get tickets. To complicate matters, the RubyConf registration...

Good news everybody! We're finally going to have JRubyConf!
After over 3 years of heavy development, dozens of deployments and hundreds of users, it's time for a conference for JRuby users. We've talked about it on the JRuby mailing lists, polled users, and seen other JRubyists do the same. And...

In June of this year, I spent a few hours formulating a dynamic cousin to Duby. Duby, if you don't remember, is a static-typed language with Ruby's syntax and Java's type system. Duby supports all Ruby's literals, uses local type inference (only argument types *must* be declared), and runs as...

We often get the question "which deployment option is the best for JRuby on Rails?" The truth is that it depends on what you need out of deployment.
If you have a fairly straightforward Rails app without a lot of service dependencies and a greenfield deployment target, your best bet...

It's been a while since I was able to work on JRuby's Android support, but tonight I managed to finally circle back. And I've got something much more impressive working today: a real IRB application!
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I should have blogged this sooner, but things have been a little...crazy...lately.
The JVM Languages Summit is coming up for its second year. The event last year was spectacular; representatives of all the major languages and several minor ones showed up and talked about their plans, their history, and their...

I'm going to be speaking about JRuby again this year at eRubyCon, in Columbus OH. I just got back from Rails Underground, which reminded me how much I love the smaller regional Ruby conferences. So I'm totally pumped to go to eRubyCon this year.
The idea of "Enterprise Ruby" has...

Here's a list of talks about Ruby or that mention/relate to Ruby at CommunityOne and JavaOne 2009. Some of these are about other languages, since I just did a dumb search for any mention of "ruby".
Add your suggestions in comments to help narrow down which talks people should go...

I just released BiteScript 0.0.2, which mainly fixes some issues defining packages and non-public classes.
BiteScript is basically just a simple DSL for generating JVM bytecode. I use it in Duby and now in the "ruby2java" compiler we'll be using to turn Ruby classes into Java classes...

A number of you have asked how you can help JRuby development. Well there's actually an easy way: fix RubySpec failures.
You may have noticed we periodically update our RubySpec "stable" revision number, and usually have to file a few bugs. This isn't because we don't want to fix those...

Today David R. MacIver pinged me in #scala and asked "headius: Presumably you guys have spent quite a lot of time trying to make things like system("vim") work correctly in JRuby and failing? i.e. I'm probably wasting my time to attempt similar?"
My first answer was "yes", since there's no...

I've merged changes into master (to be 1.3 soon) that should make Nailgun easier to use. And 1.3 will be the first release to include all NG stuff in the binary dist.
jruby --ng-server starts up a server. You can manage it however you likejruby --ng uses the Nailgun client...

In the spirit of Nick Sieger's short statement on the recent uproar over Matt Aimonetti's "pr0n star" talk, I'm posting my one and only blog response to the whole thing.
Unlike Nick, I too often have used this blog as a soapbox. And too often I've ground my personal axe...

I figured I'd give Typo a try on JRuby today. It has been working for quite a while, but with the GlassFish gem improving so much I thought it would be good to write up an updated walkthrough. It's pretty simple.
BTW, is Typo still the preeminent blog package for...

It occurred to me today that a lot of people probably want a JRuby deployment option that works with a front-end web server. I present for you the trivial steps required to host a JRuby server behind Apache.
Update: It's worth mentioning that this works fine with JRuby + Mongrel...

There's been a lot of supposition about the future lately, and I've certainly read and succumbed to the temptation of the prognosticator. I'm not going to comment on any of the players or put forward my own suppositions about what might happen. What I will do here is talk about...

We have successfully migrated JRuby development to Git!
The main repository is on the JRuby kenai.com project, but most folks will just want to clone the official mirror on Github. The mirror lags by no more than five minutes, and we'll eliminate that lag soon...