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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.
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.
RSpec has become a poster child for both Domain Specific Languages and Behavior Driven Development (BDD), a type of Test Driven Development. The new RSpec 1.1 release adds improved support for Rails and other improvements.
RSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development acceptance testing framework for Ruby or Java that enables developers to turn acceptance specifications from the business into executable examples of expected behaviour. Dan North built a separate extension, RBehave, to express story-level integration tests with RSpec. David Chelimsky has now incorporated RBehave-like functionality into the RSpec trunk.
Rubinius is a Ruby implementation with a twist: it's written (mostly) in Ruby, building on concepts from Smalltalk VMs. We talked to Rubinius project lead Evan Phoenix about the state of the project and VM internals.
Two members of the JRuby core team, Ola Bini and Charles O. Nutter, wonder whether Microsoft's IronRuby could possibly be a fully compliant Ruby implementation and run Rails, given Microsoft's policies. A viable alternative to IronRuby, the Ruby.NET compiler, is suggested.
Evan Phoenix, who created Rubinius, a Ruby VM written in Ruby, has been hired by EngineYard. He'll work on Rubinius half time. This means that all Ruby implementations (Ruby, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius) now have paid developers working on them.
The number of Ruby implementations grows steadily, but something is missing: a Ruby specification. The behavior of the Ruby language and its standard libraries is defined in the code of the main Ruby implementation. Two Google SoC projects aim to fix this by creating executable RSpec specifications for Ruby. We caught up with Pedro Del Gallego who works on one of these projects.
14 Ruby projects were accepted for the Google Summer of Code bounty program. The projects range from a debugger for Rails, to a project writing an RSpec specification for Ruby, to protocol implementations using EventMachine and Ragel, and more.
