RailsConf Writeups: Your First Day With JRuby on Rails

InfoQ has a JRuby talk that really doesn’t share that much with the talk that they gave during the tutorial session at RailsConf, and that does the presenters a disservice. Even though they were not the most engaging speakers on the bill for the weekend, they had great slides and a great plan to present their material effectively. As Glenn Vanderburg says Boring is great for JRuby Unfortunately, it is still hard when someone audibly falls asleep twice during your presentation.

For those of you who don’t know about JRuby, please click on a few of the links from this post to inform yourself. I don’t have very much to add besides my impression that JRuby is already a very big deal and they announced that they will go 1.0 within a month. That seems impressive to me with the outstanding bug list, but, of course, we’ll see. As exciting as Ruby is, it’s important that the entire community remembers that not only is our favorite language still very young on the scene. By any factor that you’d care to conjure (developers who know the language, book sales, installed base, project count, etc.), Ruby is still much smaller than Java. By building the bridge so that these two great languages can live together on the JVM (an amazing technology itself), both languages will be far the better for it.

I will update this post if the slides become available and their availability attracts my attention.