Tag: jruby

Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun, where three core team members of the JRuby development team work. Charles Nutter and company have jumped ship to join EngineYard, a prominent hosting company and a major supporter of the Ruby community. In fact, they’re one of the sponsors of our local RubyNation Conference. There’s more information about this on Slashdot.org.

JRuby has come a long way in the last two years. There’s been a ferocious amount of work put into re-implementing Ruby in Java, complicated by the fact that there has never been a written specification for the Ruby language.

There has also been some intense cooperation between the JRuby development team, the original Ruby developers and the Rails core team. The goal was to make JRuby a viable platform for fielding Rails applications. Further, by allowing easy access to legacy Java code, the hope has been that JRuby would provide an easy mechanism to allow Rails and Java applications to live happily together, or to provide an easy way to transition from Java to Rails (in much the same way that C++ was an easy transition from C).

In recent speed tests that have been publicized on the web, it appears that JRuby is now generally faster than Ruby. Check out this blog post for more information.

JRuby has clearly evolved into a viable platform for fielding Rails applications. I expect to see some changes in the Rails landscape over the next year, as Rails expands away from so-called “green-field” applications and becomes more of a player in corporate development efforts. This will, in turn, be a key factor in helping Rails jump the “adoption chasm” and become a more widely used technology.