The Ruby programming language has exploded in popularity, spurred in part by the agility of the Rails web framework. Rails has in turn changed the way we look at web development. The two together are forcing developers to rethink how applications should be written. The world is changing. JRuby aims to bring Ruby to Java developers and provide an alternative platform for Ruby developers.
In this presentation Thomas and Charles explain Ruby and show what makes it great, demonstrate how JRuby brings Ruby to Java and Java to Ruby, explore how JRuby on Rails brings agile web development to Java EE and Java EE's best features to Rails, and discuss the future of Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages on the JVM.
Thomas Enebo is project manager and a developer of the open source project JRuby. He is a developer at the University of Minnesota and a consultant with Aandtech Inc. Tom has been using Java in some fashion since its first public beta release. He became interested in Ruby after seeing an elegant re-implementation of some Perl code. Tom joined the JRuby project some time in late 2002.
Charles Nutter has been a Java developer since 1996, recently working as the senior Java architect at Ventera Corp and in September moved to Sun to work full-time on JRuby! He led the open-source LiteStep project in the late 90s and came to Ruby in the fall of 2004. Since then he has been a member of the JRuby team, helping to make it a true alternative Ruby platform. Charles presented JRuby at RubyConf 2005 and co-presented at JavaOne 2006 with Thomas Enebo. He hopes to co-write a JRuby book this fall with Thomas to follow up a planned JRuby 1.0 release. Charles currently works on a Ventera contract for the USDAs Food and Nutrition Service at their office in Minneapolis.
JRuby on Rails— This session will take you all the way from an introduction to Ruby and Rails (and a description on how they have managed to change the world) to showing you exactly how you can go about creating your own first JRuby on Rails web application. After this session, you will know how to get started and how to proceed, and you will have gotten a taste of the future of web development that will leave you craving for more.
A Groovy interview at JavaPolis'07— In this Groovy interview the JavaPosse members talk with Guillaume LaForge about the new features of version 1.5. They ask what he thinks about the Closures controversy and how it fits in the Groovy language. How can you leverage Groovy in an enterprise Java project using Grails and what books should we Groovy newbies read ?
Project Phobos— This JavaPolis presentation will cover an open source project code-named Phobos which is a lightweight, scripting-friendly, web application environment running on the Java platform, aimed at addressing emerging developer requirements. The goal of Project Phobos is to show that Java is an excellent platform for server-side scripting, allowing dynamic-language developers to leverage the power of Java SE and EE.
JRuby-team JavaPolis 2006 Interview— JRuby aims to bring Ruby to Java developers and provide an alternative platform for Ruby developers. In this interview the JRuby team talk about their experience in building JRuby on top of the Java virtual machine. Can JRuby compile to Java code, will it be used for domain languages and many more questions are fired by our JavaPolis interviewer Ted Neward.
