Sun Officially Backs Ruby, Brings JRuby In-House

Posted by Peter Cooper on Sep 07, 2006

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Charles Nutter reports that he and JRuby co-developer Thomas Enebo are becoming employees of Sun Microsystems later this month. JRuby is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter and Nutter reports that Java are backing a "Ruby-on-JVM" strategy:

The potential for Ruby on the JVM has not escaped notice at Sun, and so we'll be focusing on making JRuby as complete, performant, and solid as possible. [..] I'm also making it a personal priority to continue growing the JRuby community, foster greater cooperation between the Java and Ruby worlds, and work toward a "whole-platform" Ruby-on-JVM strategy for Sun.

Nutter also reports that JRuby will remain open-source, despite being under Sun's custodianship, although Sun is rapidly becoming a proponent of open-source software with Sun's process of open-sourcing Java itself.

InfoQ has also just released a video / slide presentation of Nutter and Enebo demonstrating and showing off the power of JRuby.

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   What about groovy?

   by Horia Muntean

   How do you think this move will affect groovy's fate?

   Reply

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   what about groovy...

   by Joost de Vries

   Well, if Sun does the right thing they'll let a thousand flowers bloom.
   If they'd endorse jruby more than groovy I'd understand that: ruby's momentum is undeniable.

   Reply

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   Whish thy did the same for Jython

   by Luis Trigueiros

   It is god from Sun to do this, but I whish thy add done the same for Jython

   Reply

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   Re: What about groovy?

   by Rod Johnson

   I don't think something good for JRuby has to be bad for Groovy. It's likely that dynamic languages on the JVM are a growth area. And competition is good and should be encouraged in general.
   
   I think this is a very encouraging move from Sun. The JVM is bigger than Java.
   
   Btw Spring 2.0 supports the authoring of components in both JRuby and Groovy, as well as other languages (and the mechanism is extensible). See the chapter on dynamic language support from the reference manual.

   Reply

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   Re: What about groovy?

   by Horia Muntean

   Well, I did not imply that Groovy will die a horrible death because Sun hired JRuby core developers.
   
   But in our fast moving world, full of hype and shadows, a delay of one single year in delivering a solid platform could mean much. Remember that Rails is related to (J)Ruby as Groovy is related to Grails. Groovy and Grails are younger and imature but IMHO Sun could help here at least as much as they go with JRuby.
   
   Floyd Marinescu has an argument for this desirable support for Groovy( Grails ) here: www.infoq.com/news/groovy-jsr6-interview#view_1245. But no luck yet.
   
   Maybe some Google employees could help Groovy because they can spend 1 day in a week working on pets projects, right?

   Reply

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   Performant... the birth of a word

   by Frank Cohen

   "making JRuby as complete, performant, and solid as possible"
   
   I've been giving talks about SOA, XML and performance to developer audiences and when it comes to an adjective to describe a software application's ability to deliver good performance I've found myself saying "performant"... As in, the software is functional and performant.
   
   Unfortunately performant is not in dictionary.com or any of the other dictionaries I use. A performant is a noun describing someone on stage, like an actor. But it is not yet recognized as an adjective for offering good performance.
   
   I'd like to promote the use of performant because it seems like a natural use of the root word performance.
   
   -Frank

   Reply

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