Things are looking very good for JavaOne.
The past several months have been a period of furious development on the JRuby project, with milestone after milestone flying by. Four months ago we couldn't run most basic Ruby apps and were still wrestling with basic 1.8 compatibility issues. Since that time...

Scripting and services top Sun software chief's list:
"Support for scripting languages in Java, squeezing revenue from a set of long-promised - but strangely MIA - services, and more open source initiatives are among top priorities for Sun Microsystems' newly appointed software chief.…"...

Having discovered the power and magic of bytecode generation, it occurred to me that none of the existing libraries have the subtle elegance that most code generation tasks really deserve. I believe there's a simple reason for this: they're written in Java. Some of them really try to make things...

I've entered all the sessions I'm planning to attend into Google Calendar, available at the following URLS:
- RSS- ICal- You can search for "Headius at JavaOne" in GCal too. ...

Since it's turned out to be so easy to generate bytecodes based off the Ruby AST, I tackled another trouble spot for us: literal array creation.
The current interpreter, in order to follow a generic, iterative model, has a large overhead for instantiating literal arrays. For example, to create the...

I'll put a big fat disclaimer here stating that these results are extremely preliminary, and mean practically nothing. I'm just very tired and very excited that after seven hours of work, I've already made some progress...I sorta, kinda compiled some Ruby code to Java bytecodes. Yes, I've been up all...

Things have really been clicking along on JRuby. Tom has been knocking down Rails unit tests left and right, and more and more stuff is working. I found a nice little performance booster that gives us as much as 30-40% speed increase when starting up. Other folks have been working...

After seeing David Heinemeier Hansson ask the "Groovy on Rails" project not to use that moniker (since it isn't Ruby, it isn't Rails, and it has a completely separate codebase), I figured I'd play it safe and ask him directly whether "JRuby on Rails" would be acceptable. We intend to...

I ran into this a bit ago and found no solutions online. I figured it was my duty to provide at least one posting on how I solved it, since there seems to be a lot of frustrated people out there. My eventual solution was to run with 1.5 instead...

I've decided to add a personal blog, since many other tech writers do the same (and it seemed like a good idea).
Pop over to Headius@Home...

It must be something of a debate in the blogosphere as to whether titles should be descriptive, possibly giving away a great secret hidden within an entry's text, or whether titles should only hint at the truth, enticing a curious and diligent reader to venture onward. The former perhaps produces...

Feeling More and More Ruby with Gems
Things are speedily moving along. We have been continuing our work on Rails, but because of an unusually active JRuby community, we recently changed direction for a bit. We decided to tackle RubyGems...

It seems that JRuby is more than just an entertaining and challenging project; it's also getting attention from folks that matter at Sun Microsystems.
Tim Bray, Sun Web Technologies director and XML specification co-editor, has recently taken an interest in JRuby. He's corresponded by email with both Tom and myself,...

Recently a post by James McGovern on Why Ruby Isn't Enterprise Ready floated my way. I felt it necessary to offer up a response. My disclaimers: I am not familiar with McGovern's past work, I am not (yet) using Ruby in the "enterprise", and I am far from a Ruby...

I considered making a post last week, to keep up my at-least-one-posting-per-week schedule. However, I had dug myself deep into Rails' generator script and the built-in generators and resolved myself to finally get them running. There were a number of more complicated issues to solve, but it felt like I...

It's been a busy few days. We've made more good progress, so I figured an update was due.
Last Class...

I should post about things not working more often.
Within a few hours after my previous post, where I showed the world how IRB now starts up successfully in JRuby but does not work, I was back at it trying to fix the next few bugs preventing it from working...

We've been very productive on JRuby over the past week. Progress is being made on many fronts, and I'm more excited than ever about JRuby's potential. Here's a few updates on Rails, IRB, and JRuby's future for those of you following along. It's a long post, but each subsection stands...

I will admit it. I'm fed up with Ant.
My current charge has me as architect for a number of larger applications and the platform on which they run--perhaps over 1Mloc total from DB to front-end. These applications must be deployable across several environments (dev, integ, qa, ua, prod, prod...

I've been making good progress on my end of the Rails-on-JRuby work. I have been focusing on getting the "generate" script working, and as a result fixing multiple bugs and minor issues as they come up. Here's an update.
The most recent issue, now apparently mostly fixed, involved evaluating a...