Yes, friends, it's time one again for a JRuby tour. This trip, we're localizing to the islands of Japan. Do I have any Japanese readers out there?
Here's our route for this trip...it's going to be a crazy ten days:...

Hooray! The RubySpec Project, a collection of runnable specifications for Ruby 1.8.6ish behavior, has graduated into its own domain. Finally there's a lively, fast-moving, independent project to create a Ruby specification and test kit. And it's already well on its way.
Better documentation on how to pull the specs, update...

In the past couple days, a new project release was announced that has shown once again the potential of the Java platform. Shown how the awesome JVM has not yet begun to flex its muscles and really hit its stride in this project's domain. Made clear that even projects with...

I've been on Twitter for a while, but only recently started using it in earnest. I've got 'rific, have my Growl notifications up, and run a few Tweetscans through my feed reader to rush to the rescue of JRubyists in trouble. But I try to do something it seems most...

So after a long wait, Apple finally released Java 6 for OS X. It's for Leopard only. And Leopard is apparently going to be the only Java-supporting OS without a 32-bit Java 6.
I can accept that it only runs in Leopard. They're moving forward, and with Java shipped as...

There's something that's been bugging me for a long time that I need to get off my chest. Some of you may hate me for it, but perhaps there are others out there with the same complaint, silently in agony, wishing for death to take the pain away. It's time...

My how things have changed in a couple short years.
Two years ago, in 2006, there were essentially two viable Ruby implementations: Matz's Ruby 1.8.x codebase, and JRuby. At the time, JRuby was just barely starting to run Rails. I consider that a sort of "singularity" in the lifetime of...

Conrad Meyer of the Fedora project yesterday tossed me this link to a build log from a Fedora build machine for...you guessed it, JRuby. Conrad has been chasing down JRuby bugs, hanging out on IRC and working JRuby through the approval process to be packaged and available in Fedora, and...

At JavaOne this year, there will be a session entitled "The Script Bowl", in which JRuby, Groovy, and Scala will face off on a series of challenges. I suggested that the list of challenges include a range of things each of our language communities could try to implement, and this...

On Monday evening, the various Ruby implementers (sans John Lam since he had a schedule conflict) got together on FreeNode IRC in #ruby-core to discuss various design and future-related agenda items.
Here's the agenda and IRC log, and here's a rundown of what was discussed...

In this post, Glen Stampoultzis posts a very interesting and clever sequence of steps by which he converts a piece of Java code into idiomatic Groovy code. I thought it was a nice article, so I'll do a very short spin on it: taking Glen's final Groovy code and converting...

I'm very tired. I've been in the EU since last week Wednesday, first at Euruko in Prague, then getting slides ready for Scotland on Rails, and finally preparing a release announcement with Tom today. It's been a very long 11 days. So here's some quick hits for you.
EuRuKo FTW...

One of the big reasons people have been interested in JRuby lately is because it is currently the only Ruby implementation that can both host multiple instances in a single process and run threads *actually* in parallel. Ruby 1.8 is entirely green-threaded. Rubinius has support for multiple parallel in-process VMs,...

Late last week I wired up a quick proof-of-concept C back-end for Duby, to show that it is possible. Duby's design represents all types as symbols, which allows the type representation to vary across platforms. So in fib(), the fixnum type is represented as ":fixnum" throughout, and it can be...

Akira Tanaka just did a lightning talk on IO.copy_stream, a new method added to Ruby 1.9 last night that does a fast stream transfer all in C code, avoiding the intermediate strings. It's a good idea, one I hope takes hold for other IO operations that could use some native...

It's been...oh my, almost two weeks since I broke the news about Duby. Since then I attended PyCon and we managed to get JRuby 1.1 RC3 out the door, which is looking like it will become JRuby 1.1 final. But I've still been working on Duby in my spare time...

We were just discussing GSoC a bit, and another idea occurred to me:
Survey existing language implementations and how they're solving similar problems like POSIX, code generation/compilation, parsing, and so on, and work with project leads to pull out common solutions into reusable APIs.This would be a huge help to...

It's been one of those nights, my friends! An outstanding night!
All day Sunday I had the stupids. It was probably related to a few beers on Saturday night, or the couple glasses of red wine before that. Whatever it was, I didn't trust myself to work on any JRuby...

With JRuby 1.1 approaching, performance looking great, and general Ruby compatibility better than its ever been, we've started to branch out into more libraries and applications. So a couple days ago, I thought I'd make good on a promise to myself and have a look at getting RubyInline working on...

Upcoming event round-up!
Next weekend, Tom Enebo, Nick Sieger and I will be at PyCon, checking out all the pythony goodness and hooking up with the Jython guys for some hacking.Tom and I will travel to Prague for Euruko 2008, the European RubyConf. We'll present JRuby, unsurprisingly, and hopefully meet...