Roy Hayun presented his "JRuby on ME" talk this past JavaOne and got a pretty solid response. He ported a pre-1.0 JRuby to CDC by incrementally stripping out libraries and functionality that couldn't be supported. He succeeded, and yesterday delivered to us a buildable version of his JRubME 0.1 (that...

Hopefully by now you've heard about the GlassFish Gem. It's a roughly 3MB gem that includes only the pieces of GlassFish necessary to launch a production JRuby on Rails server. Instead of using WAR deployment, you just run "glassfish_rails" and point at your Rails dir. The result is a multi-request...

Inspired by Tim Bray's periodic tab sweeps (Tim, do you collect unread tabs into the dozens like I do?) here's the first of hopefully many tab sweeps from me.
Kindle by Amazon - I've been waiting for an ePaper-based reader, but I don't think this is going to be the...

I've been toying with the idea of rewriting the JRuby compiler in Ruby, or at least writing the appropriate plumbing that would allow someone to do something similar. Migrating the JRuby compiler may or may not be worth it, since the existing Java compiler is basically done and working well,...

You know Ruby. You've been coding up Ruby apps for a while now. You've seen the power and the magic that Ruby offers developers, and you've seen some of the weirder, wilder, and perhaps uglier sides of Ruby. You think you're pretty well-versed in the core classes, and you can...

In response to my post about the Ruby community needing an autotranslator for the key mailing lists, due to the language barrier between English-speaking and Japanese-speaking folks, I received quite a bit of interest, and a few people are looking into automatic solutions, manual solutions, and various solutions in between...

For those of you that don't know, RejectConf started last year at RubyConf 2006 in Denver because Ryan Davis (zenspider; author of the many parsetree-based tools like flog and heckle, part of the vlad team, and so on) had a rejected presentation and still wanted to show it off. It...

As many of you know, Ruby was created in Japan by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and most of the core development team is still Japanese to this day. This has posed a serious problem for the Ruby community, since the language barrier between the Japanese core team and community and the English-speaking...

Oh yes, you all know you love the Alioth Shootout.
Isaac Gouy has updated the JRuby numbers, and modified the default comparison to be with Ruby 1.8.6 rather than with Groovy as it was before. And true to form, JRuby is faster than Ruby on 14 out of 18 benchmarks...

A bit ago, I was catching up on my feeds and noticed that Neal Gafter had announced the first prototype of Java closures. I've been a fan of the BGGR proposal, so I thought I'd catch up on the current status and try applying it to a pain point in...

I've posted about TIOBE here before.
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!,...

The latest craze at conferences, especially those associated with O'Reilly or Ruby, is the game Werewolf (historically known as Mafia, but Werewolf has become more popular). The premise of the game is simple: (from Wikipedia's Mafia article)
Mafia (also known under the variant Werewolf or Vampire) is a party game...

I'm at RubyConf this weekend, the A-list gathering of Ruby dignitaries. Perhaps one day I'll be considered among them.
At any rate, here's the top five questions I get asked. Perhaps this will help people move directly on to more interesting subjects :)...

For those of you looking to start helping JRuby along, here's a few open 1.0.2 bugs that would be pretty easy for a newb to look at. They'd also help you get your first taste of JRuby internals. Good eatin!
This should help get you started: How Easy Is It...

Nick Sieger, a Sun coworker and fellow JRuby core team member, has posted the results of benchmarking his team's large Rails-based project on MRI and the codebase soon to be released as JRuby 1.1 (trunk). Read it here:
JRuby on Rails: Fast EnoughNow there's a couple things I get out...

We're looking to do releases of a 1.1 beta and 1.0.2 over the next couple weeks, and we're hoping to pull in help from the community to turn over as many bugs as possible. A lot of the bugs we'd like to fix for each release wouldn't be very difficult...

I've discovered a really awful bottleneck in REXML processing.
Look at these results for parsing our build.xml:read content from stream, no DOM2.592000 0.000000 2.592000 ( 2.592000)1.326000 0.000000 1.326000 ( 1.326000)0.853000 0.000000 0.853000 ( 0.853000)0.620000 0.000000 0.620000 ( 0.620000)0.471000 0.000000 0.471000 ( 0.471000)read content once, no DOM5.323000 0.000000 5.323000 ( 5.323000)5.328000...

As some of you may know, I've been busily migrating all method binding to use Java annotations. The main reasons for this are to simplify binding and to provide end-to-end metadata that can be used for optimizing methods. It has enabled using a single binding generator for 90% of methods...

It is a glorious day in JRuby-land, for the compiler is now complete.
Tom and I have been traveling in Europe the past two weeks, first for RailsConf EU in Berlin and currently in Århus, Denmark for JAOO (which was an excellent conference, I highly recommend it). And usually, that...

Recently, the JRuby team has gone through the motions of getting a definitive JRuby book underway. We've talked through outlines, some some chapter assignments, and discussed the overall feel of a book and how it should progress. I believe one or two of us may have started writing. However the...