In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Charles Nutter discusses the Ruby and JRuby featureset, the JRuby compiler, calling Java from JRuby and vice versa, programming Swing with JRuby, JRuby web applications, JRuby on Rails, persistence, build automation, Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development.
Recently, there has been a lot of debate around the usefulness Maven, which is a Java-based build and dependency management tool being used in many projects. InfoQ took a closer look at this debate to understand what issues are being encountered, and what has resulted from the debate.
The ease of Ruby for scripting tasks makes it a very powerful candidate for writing your Test suites. Until recently there was no real standalone framework to test your Java with Ruby. JtestR, written by Ola Blini (a member of JRuby team) and Anda Abramovici, makes it possible now. Ruby coupled with powerful Ruby tools such as RSpec, mocha will make writing Java tests smoother.
Buildr is a simple and intuitive build system for Java projects. After 10 months of development and a lot of positive feedback, it will be incubated by the Apache Foundation, which will be opening its doors to its first Ruby project.
Maven 2.0 recalcitrants have been looking for alternatives with less XML and easier plugin development. Buildr might be the solution, and even boasts faster performance than Maven!
