One thing often touted as a missing feature in Ruby is the lack of a constructor form that initializes fields. A few other languages have this feature, including for example Groovy, another JVM dynamic language. The general idea is that if you want to construct an object and initialize a...

I love how meta-programmable Ruby is.
JRuby doesn't support annotations because Ruby doesn't support annotations. So what! We can extend Ruby to add something like annotations:class JPABeandef self.inherited(clazz) @@annotations = {}enddef self.anno(annotation) @@last_annotation = annotationend...

I've started a Google Group for all those interested in the future of alternative languages (i.e. not Java) on the JVM. A number of you knew this was coming, and I've already invited folks that expressed an interest in my RedMonk Unconference session at JavaOne. The rest of you are...

I've been invited to this year's Foo Camp. Since it sounds like a great time and there's a bunch of other folks going I'd like to talk to, I'm accepting the invitation. My purpose posting this entry is to let other campers know I'll be there and try to hook...

We're within weeks of a final JRuby 1.0. We've pared down the bugs that we think we can or must fix for 1.0 and this email is a summary of the ones we need help with. So whatever time you can spare, please have a look and help resolve these.<br...

I just came across this amusing entry from an old, now-defunct blog of mine on LiveJournal.
The last line pretty much says it all. I must have been really frustrated with my job at the time:Someone should pay me to sit at home and do great things.(If you don't get...

Today Tom and I met with fellow language implementers Oti Humbel, Charlie Groves, and Tobias Ivarsson to start discussions about JSR-292 (invokedynamic) with John Rose, longtime VM implementer and new spec lead. It was an excellent discussion, with John listening patiently to the implementation challenges we've had on JRuby and...

Big news today from ThoughtWorks Studios! Their collaborative development project management solution Mingle (think SourceForge, but pretty and usable) will be the first commercially-distributed Rails application to run on JRuby. Jon Tirsen summarizes the justification for this move in a Studios blog post.
The reasons are obvious ones to those...

Yes, I've managed to secure a small order of JRuby t-shirts for giveaway at JavaOne and RailsConf. And they're pretty sweet, have a look at the logo on the front:
...

Tom and I are giving our JRuby on Rails talk twice at JavaOne next week, and while wrestling with ScheduleBuilder I discovered something surprising: the thursday session is already FULL! Perhaps I underestimated how many people would be interested in seeing us prattle on about the future of Java web...

Ok folks, this is the beginning. I'm going to try, in the midst of JavaOne Day Zero chaos, to run the first big *open* JVM dynamic languages get-together.
It will be part of RedMonk's Unconference running parallel to CommunityOne on Monday, May 7th. It is a *FREE* event. Yes, I...

The latest Ruby Blogging Contest hits close to home: What changes would make Ruby into a better language without making it into something that isn't Ruby?
As you might guess, I've got some pretty strong thoughts here. I'm not a heavy Rails user, and I'm not as heavy a Ruby...

Since it looks like Antonio Cangiano is going to delay the next running of the bulls until Ubuntu 7.04 is released, I figured the next JRuby 1.0 update could be about performance.
Performance is such a tricky area for Ruby. Folks outside the Ruby community happily malign its performance, fueled...

Remember way back when the IRB applet was first thrust upon the world, and I promised that you truly could now use Ruby in the browser? At the time, it was still a little cumbersome, and generally you could only use Ruby by passing it directly into the applet.
Well...

Well friends, the countdown has begun. Within the next several weeks, we're looking at getting a 1.0 release out in either beta or RC form. Of course most of you OSS folks know how arbitrary release numbers are...the day after we branch 1.0 we're going to start committing to 1.1,...

I haven't blogged a solid JRuby update recently...and this one isn't going to be as solid as I'd like, but it should let you all know that the wheels are still moving and the train is picking up speed. It's astounding how much progress is being made.
ActiveRecord Now Fully...

# scripting.rb
include Scriptable...

I've spent some time this weekend looking over the Grails codebase. After a truly gigantic checkout (Grails bundles production JARs for all the libraries it integrates) and after swimming through a substantial, single-project sea of source files, I think I'm starting to follow it (though a tour by someone familiar...

See, here's the deal. I'm not a very advanced IDE user. I used Eclipse for years and JDE before that, and I wouldn't ever have considered myself a "pro" with either. I learned what I needed to get the job done and not a whole lot else. Beyond that I...

Things have been moving quickly in JRuby-land, and we've just kicked out a major release in JRuby 0.9.8. Among the big features:
Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and override methodsNew Java primitive array syntaxReimplementation of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more correct and performantSignificant bottlenecks have...