Migration

With the announcement of JRuby in Glassfish or the end of mongrel it seems to offer Sun the hope of capturing more developers not just from Ruby but from .NET. Many people from both Java and C# worlds jumped to Ruby and it occurred to me that .NET developers using Netbeans for Ruby development may notice that there's a suprisingly good C# clone under the covers.

Win Some, Lose Some

In, Rocking with Ruby, I made the outlandish claims that: "Continuations are going to be a key piece of infrastructure.". So maybe not, with the recent news that Seaside is going away from it: "One thing I’d like to do is reduce the dependence of Seaside on continuations - they drove a lot of the initial interest in the framework but they’re becoming (or seeming) much less important over time, and the use cases to which they’re best suited are these days often addressed with AJAX instead."

The other claim that seems to have worked out though was, "That future languages and platforms will probably be deployed on .NET and Java VMs. The competition between the two seems to have a positive impact on both - locking out any competitors. That means, there's something to look forward to in Java 7 and .NET 3." This follows the news about JRuby: "JRuby has been getting more and more attention from folks within Sun, Rubyists around the world, and especially from Java developers anxious to escape from their Java-only prisons."

Iron VMs

Will It Be JRuby vs. IronPython? "On the heels of Microsoft's release of IronPython 1.0 comes the news that Sun has hired the two primary JRuby developers.

I don't know if Sun intended it, but the juxtaposition of these two news item gives the effect that the two managed execution environments—The JVM and .NET—have each chosen an anointed champion scripting language for their platform.

The orphan that's left out of the spotlight is Jython. I feel kind of sad for Jython and its lone publicly known active maintainer Frank Wierzbicki."

JRuby Steps Into the Sun "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. We'll then proceed on to help build out broader tool support for Ruby, answering calls by many in the industry for a "better" or "smarter" Ruby development experience."

JRuby now does Rails**

"** We are able to generate and run the cookbook demo from rolling with rails tutorial (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html) with what we have and all appears to work. With this said, it is likely that there are several aspects of rails that are not working correctly. See docs/README.rails for known issues/instructions in release."

JRuby "WEBrick runs...Ruby on Rails runs on top of WEBrick (and generation scripts work)**"

Time for a free lunch:

"I believe I've found a 'free lunch' in Ruby on rails. Oh, it's not always free. If I need to do two-phased commit or hardcore object relational mapping, this lunch may cost me more than I'm willing to pay. But often enough, it's for all practical purposes free.

* I can train a team of Rails developers faster than I can teach a new Java developer Spring plus Hibernate plus whatever web mvc you want plus all of the other frameworks and tools Java developers have to know.
* I can build my applications much faster than I could before.
* For many applications, the latency in the database is the overriding concern, so I don't even notice differences in performance.
* I can trivially expose web services, letting other applications, potentially written in other languages, quickly access my Rails services.

Now, I know that some will tell me that the lunch really isn't free. But you can tell that to my customers that pay a fraction of the price they'd pay for a Java application, and get something that's easier to maintain, just as fast, and on an earlier schedule. From that exec's perspective, the lunch is free."