Mirko is a research assistant at the Institute for Software at University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil in Switzerland, where he works on various Eclipse plug-ins for C++, Ruby and Scala. Mirko's interests are programming languages and tools that make the life of developers easier. He also likes the theater and spends too much on fashion. His blog can be found at www.misto.ch
JRuby is built on Java - so it can make use of Java Web Start to make it easy to deploy JRuby apps. This article walks through the necessary steps for releasing a JRuby app with Java Web Start, including: how to handle signing, setting JRuby parameters and a look at using JRuby 1.1's coming AheadOfTime (AOT) compilation feature.
The successor of Ruby 1.9.3 will replace the current Lazy Sweep Garbage Collector with a Bitmap Marking GC, which will significantly reduce Ruby's memory usage for parallel programs, similar to Ruby Enterprise Edition's copy-on-write-friendly GC. We talked with Narihiro Nakamura who implemented both the current Lazy Sweep and the Bitmap Marking GC.
The Ruby on Rails team announced the first release candidate of Rails 3.2. New features include a faster development mode, an explain feature for database queries and several smaller features. After 3.2, the next major release of Rails will be 4.0 and drop support for Ruby 1.8.7
Scala+GWT makes it possible to run Scala in the browser, the latest release supports most of the language. The new Scala+GWT Eclipse plug-in uses GWT's development mode for faster turnaround. Also, the Scala team announced a new documentation website and the date for 2012's Scala Days conference.
The latest Ruby release 1.9.3 further improves the stability and performance of the 1.9 series and brings only few new features. Ruby's license changed to 2-clause BSD + Ruby License instead of GPLv2 + Ruby License.
Exactly one year after the last major released, the Ruby on Rails team released Rails 3.1. The highlights of this release are support for HTTP Streaming, more intelligent migrations and the new assets pipeline that makes it easier to use CoffeeScript and Sass.
The latest Scala release 2.9.0 introduces parallel collections to easily utilize multicore processors. Other new features are an improved REPL, ScalaDoc and new packages for interacting with the operating system.
Scala creator Martin Odersky joined forces with Jonas Bonér, the creater of Akka, and launched Typesafe. With $3 million Series A financing led by Greylock Partners, Typesafe offers commercial support for enterprise development of multicore and cloud architectures.
New customers trying Engine Yard's Ruby cloud platform AppCloud get the first 500 hours for free. These trial accounts come with a default Ruby configuration and run on 2 virtual cores with 1.7GB of memory. After the 500 hours the account can be upgraded to a paying account or simply expire at no cost.
