InfoQ Homepage Dynamic Languages Content on InfoQ
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Ruby VM Roundup: MacRuby 0.2, JRuby JMX, Ruby 1.9
Work on MacRuby has continued, and now version 0.2 is released, continuing its path to tighter Cocoa and Objective-C integration. The JRuby trunk adds JMX MBeans to monitor the JRuby internals, e.g. the JIT. Also: Ruby 1.9.0-2 and API updates are coming up.
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WebKit Team Announces SquirrelFish, a Bytecode Based JavaScript Interpreter
The WebKit development team announced last week the development of a new interpreter for the WebKit JavaScript engine code-named SquirrelFish. According to official WebKit blog: "SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit's previous interpreter."
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Presentation: Mingle: Building a Rails-Based Product
Neal Ford talks about Mingle, Thoughtworks Studios' project management software. Besides Mingle's features, Neal also talks about the experience of building Mingle on both MRI and JRuby, and the plans for making use of JRuby specific features like AOT to improve future versions of Mingle.
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Ruby VM Roundup: IronRuby runs Rails, Ruby 1.8.7 released, Rubinius inlining experiments
Big news just in: John Lam claims IronRuby runs Rails. In other Ruby VM news, the Rubinius team is experimenting with method inlining. Also: Ruby 1.8.7 has been released.
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Interview: Orbitz.com Architecture with Brian Zimmer
In this interview filmed during QCon 2007, Brian Zimmer talks about the architectural challenges he has faced working on a a large web application as senior architect.
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JSR-292 Early Draft Review Announced
The early draft review of JSR-292 has been released. JSR-292 defines the 'invokedynamic' instruction, a bytecode instruction to assist in the implementation of dynamic languages on JVM.
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Debate and more Insights on Dynamic vs. Static Languages
The transcript of Steve Yegge’s presentation on dynamic languages in Stanford University, which he posted on his blog, triggered many reactions in the blog sphere. Cedric Beust, Ted Neward, Ola Beni and Greg Young provided their viewpoints and arguments on different tradeoffs involved in dynamic vs. static debate.
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Will Polyglotism and DSLs make Java the Last Big Language?
Ola Bini argues that the world will not have a new big language again because developers will find value in choosing different languages depending on their problem domain. Similarly Martin Folwer says that programmers will choose a language for what it can do in the same way that they choose frameworks now. On the other hand Joe Winchester debates that you can only be master of one language.
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Presentation: Getting Started with Grails
In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Jason Rudolph gives an overview and demonstration of Grails. Topics covered include Java/Grails integration, Grails plugins, creating a complete Grails sample application from scratch, the structure of a Grails application, data querying and persistence, validation, controllers and tag libraries.
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Should you really learn another language?
Blogger Gustavo Duarte cursed in church when he said that learning new programming languages is often a waste of time. He said that "In reality learning a new language is a gritty business in which most of the effort is spent on low-value tasks with poor return on time invested.". But not everyone agreed.
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Interview: Smalltalk Dave about Programming Languages, SOA, MDA and the Web
In an interview at OOPSLA, Dave Thomas talks about the reasons for the rise of Java, what's behind Web 2.0, MDA and SOA, the rise of dynamic languages and the opportunities that he sees in the web as a platform.
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MagLev: Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM
OODB vendor Gemstone works on a Ruby VM called MagLev. Working with Seaside's and DabbleDB's Avi Bryant, Gemstone bases the Ruby runtime on their Smalltalk VM to offer performance and powerful persistence features. We talked to Avi Bryant and Gemstone's Bob Walker about the technology behind MagLev and the plans for it.
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Ruby Implementations Roundup: Ruby Spec, New Design Meetings, Rubinius uses C++
Busy times for Ruby implementors recently, with regular design meetings set up (next one 30th April). The work on a Ruby Spec is continuing - with projects in GSoC and plans for continous integration for Ruby 1.8.x set up. Rubinius switched from C to C++ to implement it's core VM, but continues to use Ruby as implementation language.
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Combining General Purpose Languages and Domain Specific Languages for Model Driven Engineering
In his last blog post, Johan den Haan asks one of the key questions of model driven engineering. The article is didactic and explains how ontological and linguistic metamodels can be combined (orthogonally) to simplify code generation while enabling the combination of general purpose languages and domain specific languages concepts. He uses BPEL and BPMN as a supporting example.
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Ruby 1.8.7 Preview released, includes some backports from 1.9
The first preview of Ruby 1.8.7 is now available. Among bug fixes, this new release of the stable branch includes backports of a few features from Ruby 1.9, such as Object#tap, Symbol#to_proc and Enumerators.