A Few Thoughts on Chrome

I'm just reading through the comic and thought I'd jot down a few things I notice as I go. Take them for what they're worth, high-level opinions.
Browsers single-threaded? Maybe 10 years ago. I routinely have a CPU-heavy JS running in Firefox and it doesn't stop me working in other...
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2008-09-02 12:25:00 +0000

A Duby Update

I haven't forgotten about my promise to post on FFI and MVM APIs, but I've been taking occasional breaks from JRuby (heaven forbid!) to get some time on on Duby.
What Is Duby?...
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2008-08-31 18:11:00 +0000

Zero to Production in 15 Minutes

There still seems to be confusion about the relative simplicity or difficulty of deploying a Rails app using JRuby. Many folks still look around for the old tools and the old ways (Mongrel, generally), assuming that "all that app server stuff" is too complicated. I figured I'd post a quick...
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2008-08-24 17:30:00 +0000

Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means

There's been a little bit of buzz about David Heinemeier Hansson's announcement that Josh Peek has joined Rails core and is about to wrap up his GSoC project making Rails finally be thread-safe. To be honest, there probably hasn't been enough buzz, and there's been several misunderstandings about what it...
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2008-08-17 18:32:00 +0000

'Twas Brillig

It's been a long time since I posted last. I figured it was time to get at least a basic update out to folks.
JRuby's been clicking along really well. Perhaps a little too well. Our bug tracker counts 476 open bugs and climbing, even while we're trying to periodically...
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2008-08-07 07:07:00 +0000

libdl _dl_debug_initialize problem solved

I'm posting this to make sure it gets out there, so nobody else spends a couple days trying to fix it.
Recently, after some upgrade, I started getting the following message during JRuby's run of RubySpecs:Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 623: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!I narrowed...
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2008-08-04 05:20:00 +0000

JRuby Japanese Tour 2008 Wrap-Up!

Whew! I survived the insanity of the JRuby Japanese Tour 2008, and now it's time to report on it. This post will mostly be a blow-by-blow account of the trip, and I'll try to post more in-depth thoughts later. I am still in Tokyo and need to repack my luggage,...
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2008-06-27 15:04:00 +0000

Inspiration from RailsConf

RailsConf 2008 is over, and it was by far better than last year. I'm not one for drawn-out conference wrap-up posts so here's a summary of my most inspiring moments and if applicable how they're going to affect JRuby going forward.
IronRuby and Rubinius both running Rails has inspired me...
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2008-06-02 23:49:00 +0000

Maglev

Of course anyone who reads my blog expected I'd have something to say about Maglev once it was made public. I've previously performed what I thought was a fair analysis of the various Ruby implementations, and Maglev was mostly a sidebar. With their coming out at RailsConf, they're now fair...
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2008-06-01 09:44:00 +0000

JRuby Pre-RailsConf Hackfest on Thursday

Hey there JRubyists and JRubyists-to-be...if you're planning to be in Portland the evening of Thursday, May 29, there's going to be a sponsored JRuby hackfest for you!
The event is going to be at the McMenamins Brewpub/Restaurant at the Kennedy School. We'll have a room set aside for around 40ish...
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2008-05-22 02:25:00 +0000

JRuby on Rails Fighting Infectious Disease

A new JRuby on Rails venture was just publicly announced. It's a collaboration between Collaborative Software Initiative and the State of Utah:
Portland, Ore., May 19, 2008 - Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), the company that brings like-minded organizations together to work on collaborative software at a fraction of the cost,...
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2008-05-19 21:24:00 +0000

"Ask the Experts" Session: NetBeans 6 Ruby Support

Sun is running an "Ask the Experts" session on Ruby/JRuby support in NetBeans 6(.1) with myself, Tor Norbye, and Brian Leonard. If you've had questions about NetBeans Ruby support you'd like answered, but haven't had a chance to ask...here's your opportunity.
The main page is here: Ask the Experts...
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2008-05-18 23:46:00 +0000

The Road to Babel

It's Saturday and I'm going to be waxing poetic again. This time, it's stream-of-consciousness mind-dumping. Enjoy, or not.
The Game of Life...
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2008-05-18 03:59:00 +0000

The Great JRuby Japanese Tour

Yes, friends, it's time one again for a JRuby tour. This trip, we're localizing to the islands of Japan. Do I have any Japanese readers out there?
Here's our route for this trip...it's going to be a crazy ten days:...
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2008-05-14 23:13:00 +0000

RubySpec: Bringing Ruby Test Suites Together

Hooray! The RubySpec Project, a collection of runnable specifications for Ruby 1.8.6ish behavior, has graduated into its own domain. Finally there's a lively, fast-moving, independent project to create a Ruby specification and test kit. And it's already well on its way.
Better documentation on how to pull the specs, update...
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2008-05-14 04:34:00 +0000

The Power of the JVM

In the past couple days, a new project release was announced that has shown once again the potential of the Java platform. Shown how the awesome JVM has not yet begun to flex its muscles and really hit its stride in this project's domain. Made clear that even projects with...
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2008-05-04 03:22:00 +0000

Culling the Herd

I've been on Twitter for a while, but only recently started using it in earnest. I've got 'rific, have my Growl notifications up, and run a few Tweetscans through my feed reader to rush to the rescue of JRubyists in trouble. But I try to do something it seems most...
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2008-05-01 18:57:00 +0000

Apple Chose...Poorly

So after a long wait, Apple finally released Java 6 for OS X. It's for Leopard only. And Leopard is apparently going to be the only Java-supporting OS without a 32-bit Java 6.
I can accept that it only runs in Leopard. They're moving forward, and with Java shipped as...
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2008-04-30 02:46:00 +0000

The Rubyists are Wrong

There's something that's been bugging me for a long time that I need to get off my chest. Some of you may hate me for it, but perhaps there are others out there with the same complaint, silently in agony, wishing for death to take the pain away. It's time...
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2008-04-29 16:18:00 +0000

Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls

My how things have changed in a couple short years.
Two years ago, in 2006, there were essentially two viable Ruby implementations: Matz's Ruby 1.8.x codebase, and JRuby. At the time, JRuby was just barely starting to run Rails. I consider that a sort of "singularity" in the lifetime of...
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2008-04-27 08:27:00 +0000