I told you it would only be a couple days!
ActiveRecord 0.2 has been released. (It's actually 0.2.1 because of a minor Gem glitch)...

Supporting More Databases
A number of folks have asked about support for database X. We want to support all possible databases, of course, and JDBC gives us a huge head start on that. Many databases will only need a bit of tweaking to support all the basic CRUD operations. The...

This is a serious bummer.
I've been working through some of Rails's test cases this evening. Since I've got Depot running reasonably well now and I know I can easily wire together a simple Rails app that calls Hibernate or EJBs, I figured I'd try to get a better handle...

Ola Bini, Nick Sieger, and others have been making great progress on the ActiveRecord-JDBC adapter lately. I figure it's a good time for a brief update on progress, and a short walkthrough on how to use it.
Where We Are, Where We're Going...

I got a lot of good tips from NetBeans developers and users about how to resolve some of the issues I ran into. A number of them, as I mostly expected, were related to my running a beta that's still under development. Others are resolved via modules and add-ins (that...

In response to my previous blog, Chris Nokleberg noted that if we're using String#equals a lot, interning will have an additional benefit...namely because String#equals short-circuits if both String objects are ==. I had forgotten about that benefit, so I thought I'd poke around for places it might have an effect.<br...

A while ago, we decided to inline all appropriate symbolic strings as they entered the AST. This appeared to help performance a measurable amount, presumably for two reasons:
The AST would take up less space in the long term Since Strings cache their hashcodes, having each identical string in the...

So here's the times and places. I want to get together JRubyists to just chat a bit at some point, and it seems like Thursday or Friday would work best. The only concrete suggestion so far is the Fitzroy Tavern on the 15th, around 6:30PM-7:00PM (thanks Damian). This works for...

Tim Bray tossed me a link to an IronPython screencast given by Jim Hugunin for Jon Udell.
On the surface, it does look fairly impressive. However I'm not impressed for the reasons some folks might be. So here's the notes I took while watching this demonstration...take them for what they're...

I had planned to post a "Part 1.5" that summarized all the emailed and commented help I got for my first post, but I've been too busy working on JRuby on Rails to try most of those suggestions out. Several folks offered a whole bundle of useful tips that will...

It's official! Travel arrangements are currently being made for me to attend and present at RailsConf Europe 2006 in London!
I had not expected to make it, so this comes as a bit of a surprise. I guess I need to put together some sort of presentation now, don't I?...

I am attempting to make the switch from Eclipse to NetBeans, and this is a raw dump of the pros and cons so far during that process. Note that these are not meant to question design decisions behind various NetBeans features; they are simply differences that have made the conversion...

We've been wrestling with parser speed this past week on the JRuby project, tweaking the lexer, fiddling with the grammar and parser generator, and micro-optimizing all the various support classes. None of those experiments have helped much; performance in each case improved by only a few percentage points.
We've also...

Ola Bini on Java, Lisp, Ruby and AI
As part of his series of JRuby "howto" articles, Ola has put together an outstanding walkthrough for getting Camping running under JRuby. It has all the trimmings, including ActiveRecord over JDBC. It took surprisingly little work for us to support in JRuby...

InfoQ: The Resurgence of Java the Platform
A prescient post from Scott Delap, InfoQ's newest Java editor. As you can probably guess, I also believe Java the platform is entering a renaissance with Sun's recent promise for the platform to be "multilingual" and projects like JRuby finally coming into their...

Digg: Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have observed growing interest in dynamic programming, and plan to integrate more extensive support for dynamic language features in their respective managed language platforms.
It's interesting to see this kind of article make it to the Digg front page. The links to the eWeek articles...

JRuby's performance has never been stellar. Even before the current performance-hindering refactoring and "correctification" work began, it was almost an order of magnitude slower than MRI ("Matz's Ruby Interpreter"). When I started working on my parts of the JRuby internal redesign, I knew thing were going to get worse before...

Currently, in order to implement a Java interface in JRuby, you extend from it like so:
require 'java'...

A new member of the JRuby community, Blane Dabney, submitted a patch for JRuby socket IO to resolve a DRb issue he'd been having. Our original implementation of a "write" method was not properly handling line terminators, and would end up blocking on write calls with nothing coming out the...

RubyConf*MI
I am registered for RubyConf*MI, though it's still uncertain if I'll attend. The registration cost is a measly $20, but it sounds like it will be a good time. Grand Rapids is about a 9-hour drive, however, so I'm looking for someone to share transportation with from Minneapolis. I...