Busy Week: JRuby with Android, Maven, Rake, C exts, and More!

(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...
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2010-01-08 20:20:00 +0000

Missed RubyConf? Attend Qcon's Ruby Track!

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...
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2009-10-31 17:48:00 +0000

Announcing JRubyConf 2009

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...
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2009-09-11 16:58:00 +0000

Introducing Surinx

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...
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2009-08-26 08:52:00 +0000

Which Deployment for JRuby on Rails?

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...
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2009-08-03 04:35:00 +0000

Return of Ruboto!

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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2009-08-02 04:52:00 +0000

JVM Language Summit Call for Participation

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...
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2009-07-28 14:08:00 +0000

JRuby's Importance to Ruby, and eRubyCon 2009

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...
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2009-07-27 16:48:00 +0000

Your JavaOne 2009 Ruby Guide

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...
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2009-05-31 22:40:00 +0000

BiteScript 0.0.2 Scripting Examples

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...
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2009-05-15 04:46:00 +0000

Help JRuby by Fixing RubySpecs

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...
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2009-05-15 01:34:00 +0000

fork and exec on the JVM? JRuby to the Rescue!

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...
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2009-05-14 06:50:00 +0000

JRuby Nailgun Support in 1.3.0

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...
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2009-05-13 20:47:00 +0000

Stand and Be Counted

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...
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2009-04-30 06:51:00 +0000

Setting up Typo on JRuby

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...
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2009-04-25 15:53:00 +0000

Apache + JRuby + Rails + GlassFish = Easy Deployment!

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...
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2009-04-25 13:47:00 +0000

The Future: Part One

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...
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2009-04-22 10:36:00 +0000

JRuby Moves to Git

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...
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2009-04-14 00:30:00 +0000

How JRuby Makes Ruby Fast

At least once a year there's a maelstrom of posts about a new Ruby implementation with stellar numbers. These numbers are usually based on very early experimental code, and they are rarely accompanied by information on compatibility. And of course we love to see crazy performance numbers, so many of...
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2009-04-02 15:09:00 +0000

On Benchmarking

Sigh. It must be that time of year again. Another partially-completed Ruby implementation has started to get overhyped because of early performance numbers.
MacRuby has been mentioned on this blog before. It's a reimplementation of Ruby 1.9 targeting the Objective-C runtime--and now, targeting LLVM for immediately compiling Ruby code to...
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2009-03-29 06:25:00 +0000