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JRuby: Almost Ready for Primetime?

by Sam Aaron on Apr 25, 2007 |

JRuby 0.9.9 is now out in the wild and has been declared “ready for prime time”.

The focus on this release has been compatibility with Ruby 1.8.4. However, despite compatibility being the overall priority, performance hasn’t been ignored; JRuby 0.9.9 is 40% faster than the 0.9.8 release.

One of the compatibility benchmarks the JRuby team uses is the ability to run Rails applications without errors, and this is something that they’ve finally achieved. For example, the popular Rails blogging engine Mephisto is working well on this release. JRuby developer Ola Bini is pleased with JRuby’s compatibility with Ruby 1.8.4. He stated “compatibility is looking very good. Almost all of Ruby 1.8 [is] working flawlessly”.

The next step for JRuby is a 1.0 RC release which they are hoping to get ready for the JavaOne conference in May.

The significant achievements for JRuby 0.9.9 are:

Major compatibility and performance overhaul of String, Array, Hash,
Many YAML and Marshalling issues have been fixed,
Java Integration overhaul fixing many outstanding issues,
180 Jira issues resolved,
Several more bottlenecks removed,
Rails applications like Mephisto and plugins like Goldberg are running without hitches,
Performance has improved by 40% over 0.9.8 based on YARV benchmarks.

When asked what the main message behind this release was, Ola Bini said:

“JRuby is ready for prime time. Application developers should try their applications on JRuby NOW”

The JRuby team are very keen to get as many people using JRuby as possible, so that as many of the remaining glitches can be ironed out before the upcoming 1.0 release.

For more information on the JRuby project, check out their home page, or download and play with the latest release.