A bit ago, I was catching up on my feeds and noticed that Neal Gafter had announced the first prototype of Java closures. I've been a fan of the BGGR proposal, so I thought I'd catch up on the current status and try applying it to a pain point in...

I've posted about TIOBE here before.
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!,...

The latest craze at conferences, especially those associated with O'Reilly or Ruby, is the game Werewolf (historically known as Mafia, but Werewolf has become more popular). The premise of the game is simple: (from Wikipedia's Mafia article)
Mafia (also known under the variant Werewolf or Vampire) is a party game...

I'm at RubyConf this weekend, the A-list gathering of Ruby dignitaries. Perhaps one day I'll be considered among them.
At any rate, here's the top five questions I get asked. Perhaps this will help people move directly on to more interesting subjects :)...

For those of you looking to start helping JRuby along, here's a few open 1.0.2 bugs that would be pretty easy for a newb to look at. They'd also help you get your first taste of JRuby internals. Good eatin!
This should help get you started: How Easy Is It...

Nick Sieger, a Sun coworker and fellow JRuby core team member, has posted the results of benchmarking his team's large Rails-based project on MRI and the codebase soon to be released as JRuby 1.1 (trunk). Read it here:
JRuby on Rails: Fast EnoughNow there's a couple things I get out...

We're looking to do releases of a 1.1 beta and 1.0.2 over the next couple weeks, and we're hoping to pull in help from the community to turn over as many bugs as possible. A lot of the bugs we'd like to fix for each release wouldn't be very difficult...

I've discovered a really awful bottleneck in REXML processing.
Look at these results for parsing our build.xml:read content from stream, no DOM2.592000 0.000000 2.592000 ( 2.592000)1.326000 0.000000 1.326000 ( 1.326000)0.853000 0.000000 0.853000 ( 0.853000)0.620000 0.000000 0.620000 ( 0.620000)0.471000 0.000000 0.471000 ( 0.471000)read content once, no DOM5.323000 0.000000 5.323000 ( 5.323000)5.328000...

As some of you may know, I've been busily migrating all method binding to use Java annotations. The main reasons for this are to simplify binding and to provide end-to-end metadata that can be used for optimizing methods. It has enabled using a single binding generator for 90% of methods...

It is a glorious day in JRuby-land, for the compiler is now complete.
Tom and I have been traveling in Europe the past two weeks, first for RailsConf EU in Berlin and currently in Århus, Denmark for JAOO (which was an excellent conference, I highly recommend it). And usually, that...

Recently, the JRuby team has gone through the motions of getting a definitive JRuby book underway. We've talked through outlines, some some chapter assignments, and discussed the overall feel of a book and how it should progress. I believe one or two of us may have started writing. However the...

At conferences and online, Tom and I have long been talking about a mystery deployment option coming soon from the GlassFish team. It would combine the agile command-line-friendly model of Mongrel with the power and simplicity of deploying to a Java application server. We have shown a few quick demos,...

Answer: Very Easy!
Get the Codesvn co http://svn.codehaus.org/jruby/trunk/jrubycd jrubyantRun Your Built JRubyexport PATH=$PATH:$PWD/binjruby my_script.rbInstall Gemsgem install somegemORjruby -S gem install somegemRun the Benchmarksjruby -J-server -O test/bench/bench_method_dispatch.rb(-J-server uses the "server" JVM and -O disables ObjectSpace)...

A couple interesting "Bossies" were awarded by InfoWorld this week:
Best Open Source Programming Language - Summary: Ruby gets mad props for a vibrant community and a diverse range of implementations (e.g. JRuby), and then they go squishy and say "and these other languages are great too!"Best Open Source IDE...

Hello again friends! It's time to update you on the status of the JRuby compiler.
Compiler Status...

I know, I know. It's got native code in it, and that's bad. It's using JNI, and that's bad. But damn, for the life of me I couldn't see enough negatives to using Java Native Access that would outweigh the incredible positives. For example, the new POSIX interface I just...

I'm in the airport, but I wanted to add to the blogs reporting that JRuby 1.0.1 and Jython 2.2 have been released.
JRuby 1.0.1 is basically just a maintenance release to 1.0. It includes various compatibility fixes that have filtered in since the release, and doesn't do much to improve...

OMG NetBeans Ruby support is so awesome. I just picked up some of the recent dailies, and it does stuff I just can't believe. But don't take my word for it.
Today I stumbled back into the NetBeans Ruby Wiki, expecting to just find the same old "how to download",...

We need diversity in the JVM Languages group, and it's been brought to my attention that some popular/key/interesting languages may not have representation. So we need to change that.
If you are interested in the future of non-Java languages on the JVM, you should be on this list. Yes, we...

The facts:
Sun and many other organizations have started considering moves to Mercurial. In Sun's case, it's a mandate for all Sun-managed OSS projects (OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, etc).Moving projects to Mercurial frequently (usually?) requires IDE/tool support.Sun's IDE/tools and those of many other organizations are Java-based (NetBeans, Eclipse, and so on).Mercurial is...