Sunday Night Niblets

Camping
After a minor fix provided by Ola Bini (thanks Ola!) we now have Camping running under JRuby, using the ActiveRecord JDBC adapter. According to Ola, Camping under JRuby seems to run very well, and feels very snappy. I'm going to be playing with it a bit soon, and may...
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Aug 07, 2006

Calling all Tor Norbyes

Ok, perhaps the blogosphere can help with this one. I've been trying to respond to an email from Tor Norbye at Sun Microsystems since Sunday. Unfortunately, my emails seem to be shuffled off into the ether. He sent another email to me today, saying he hasn't heard back from me.<br...
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Aug 03, 2006

Busy Bees

I haven't posted anything substantive in a while, but things are moving rapidly forward. Here's a quick summary of what's been going on with JRuby:
RubySpec...
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Aug 02, 2006

On Coding

It's 2AM. The western world is asleep. Bats flit and chatter outside my urban Minnesota home, chasing mosquitos. My available television channels (only broadcast; I don't have cable) have been reduced to dating shows, infomercials, and evangelical fundraisers.
I'm up coding. Why?...
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Jul 29, 2006

The Fastest Ruby Platform? or Hey, Isn't Java Supposed to be Slow?

I love stirring up trouble. In working on the compiler for JRuby, it's become apparent that a few targetted areas could yield tremendous performance benefit even in pure-interpreted mode. I describe a bit of this evening's study here.
As an experiment, I cut out a bunch of the stuff in...
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Jul 23, 2006

Conference Updates

JavaPolis 2006 - Antwerp, Belgium
I have received confirmation from my employer, Ventera Corporation, that they will fund my trip to Antwerp. Hooray! I'm also planning on bringing my wife and spending the holiday season in Europe. It ought to be a great trip, right on the heels of presenting...
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Jul 19, 2006

JRuby in the News

July 17 was a particularly big news day for JRuby. Three articles were posted, one in two places, on JRuby and the two core developers Tom and I. I present here a collection of articles and blogs that have particular significance to the Ruby+Java world.
Ruby for the Java worldJoshua...
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Jul 18, 2006

Is Reflection Really as Fast as Direct Invocation?

This was originally posted to the jruby-devel mailing list, but I am desperate to be proven wrong here. We use reflection extensively to bind Ruby methods to Java impls in JRuby, and the rumors of how fast reflection is have always bothered me. What is the truth? Certainly there are...
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Jul 09, 2006

On Net Neutrality

It's not really Ruby or Java-related, but with all the noise about net neutrality the past few weeks I figured I'd put my opinions out there. I doubt any of this is particularly original, but it's where I stand.
I believe, as do most well-informed Netizens, that Verizon et al...
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Jul 05, 2006

JRuby 0.9.0 Released

And it's out the door! We are currently sending out the announcement: JRuby 0.9.0 is released!
Any frequent readers out there will know there's a ton of improvements in this release. I'll be blogging a bit later on the details of each, but here's a short list:All non-native Ruby libraries...
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Jul 05, 2006

Rails 1.1.4 Runs Unmodified in JRuby

Rails 1.1.4 was released on Friday to very little fanfare. It was basically a fixit release for routing logic that broke in the 1.1.3 release (which broke while fixing a security issue in 1.1.2, etc). However, there's a less visible but vastly more interesting fix (for JRubyists) also included in...
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Jul 01, 2006

Connections Freeze over Linux PPTP Client

Because my last "howto" post about an Eclipse issue ended up helping someone, I'm posting another.
I have PPTP set up on my Linux-based desktop, but I had been having no end of problems with large file transfers or long-running connections over it. They appeared to freeze up or die...
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Jul 01, 2006

Ruby.NET Compiler Passes test.rb

Queensland University of Technology's Ruby.NET project has achieved a major milestone: their Ruby to .NET compiler is able to run and pass all the test.rb samples in the C Ruby distribution. They've got plenty more work to do to be "Ruby compatible" in any sense of the words, but they're...
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Jun 27, 2006

Mongrel in JRuby?

I'm going to try to post more frequent, less-verbose entries to break up the time between longer articles. This is the first.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Mongrel is a (mostly) Ruby HTTP 1.1 server, designed to escape the perils of cgi/fcgi/scgi when running web frameworks like Rails...
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Jun 15, 2006

Unicode in Ruby, Unicode in JRuby?

The great unicode debate has started up again on the ruby-talk mailing list, and for once I'm not actively avoiding it. We have been asked many times by Java folks why JRuby doesn't suport unicode, and there's really been no good answer other than "that's the way Ruby does it".<br...
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Jun 15, 2006

Bringing RubyGems to JRuby OR The Zen of Slow-running Code

JRuby now supports RubyGems, and gems install correctly from local and remote. That's a huge achievement, especially considering the extra work that was required around YAML to get to this point. However, I'll start off with the caveats this time.
JRuby is very slow to install gems. You'll see what...
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Jun 10, 2006