[Clev-jug] [ANN] erubycon - Enterprise Ruby Conference, February 2007

[Doug Pierce]

This conference might be especially relevant to JUG members since Sun
just hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.  The duo is better known
as "The JRuby Guys."  It sounds like Sun is looking at bringing
dynamic typing to Java, adding developer tools for Ruby to NetBeans,
and might possibly try to make the JVM a platform for running Ruby
(and quite possibly Rails) via JRuby.

Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with James Gosling,before
the announcement of hiring the JRuby lead developers, that is quite
interesting (and you really don't get much more relevant a JUG list
than the father of Java talking about Java):

" How do you view Ruby and other emerging languages in relation to
Java, is this a natural evolution, or is there a danger people will be
all over the board with boutique programming languages?
	
James Gosling: I've always been a big fan of diversity and diversity
certainly has its dark sides and it's like it's really confusing. The
thing that Java tries to do and is actually remarkably successful at
is spanning a lot of different domains, so you can do app server work,
you can do cell phone work, you can do scientific programming, you can
write software, do interplanetary navigation, all kinds of stuff in
Java, whereas a lot of these other languages get a lot of their
strength from being fairly domain specific. And at some level I don't
really care about the programming language. What I really care about
is the underlying semantics and the ability for things to
interconnect.

The Java Virtual Machine is reasonably general purpose. Over the years
there have been literally hundreds of languages built on top of it,
most of which nobody has really cared enough about. So, when you take
a language and you host it on the Java Virtual Machine, you get really
interesting portability, if you do it right you can get very
interesting performance and most of all what you get is the ability to
interoperate and interact across languages – having stuff written in
JRuby directly calling stuff written in Python or Jython or Groovy.
There's even a compiler for Visual Basic to target the Java Virtual
Machine. The traditional way of implementing programming languages is
one where they're all individual islands that don't really
interoperate at any level that's more fine grained than network
protocols. You can't call similar APIs without breaking it into a
server and calling across address faces, something that's fairly
expensive. The Virtual Machine is what lets them be one big reasonably
happy family.

Have you had any chance yourself to look at Ruby?
Gosling: I guess I'd call myself moderately familiar. I haven't used
it a lot. I have somewhat. As a language it's fine. The interesting
bit is the Rails framework. The Rails framework, if what you want to
do fits with what the Rails framework wants to do, it's actually
pretty slick. But people use all the methodology of the Rails
framework in Java all the time. In fact there are various ways you can
use Rails on the Java platform. There's Groovy, which is kind of this
hybrid between Java and Ruby, that's hosted on the Java VM and they
have Grails – Groovy on Rails, which is basically all the concepts
from the Rails framework wrapped around Groovy. And then there's the
JRuby guys who have something that lets you run Ruby programs on top
of the Java VM and that's starting to get pretty interesting. All the
"on Rails" stuff works perfectly well in that environment and it gives
you the ability to access all of the Java APIs."

Hmm.  Seems like Gosling has a keen interest in Rails running on JVM.

On 11/5/06, David P. Caldwell <inonit at inonit.com> wrote:
>
>  Rob Biedenharn wrote:
> Apparently you didn't take the time to read it.  Do you never use any other
> language in your Enterprise Java projects?  Of course, the question is
> rhetorical because you most certainly use XML.
>
>  If any of your members are interested in learning how Ruby might be a good
> addition to one's toolkit, they just might be interested in what the
> speakers at this conference have to say since they know a thing or two about
> Java.
>
>  [snip]
>
>  I'm sorry that you feel that a single announcement about a conference that
> is certainly relevant to some of you members is SPAM, but I won't apologize
> for attempting to inform you and your other members.
>  Hi, Rob.
>
>  No need to get snippy -- the poster has a point.  The fact that this is
> "relevant to some of you [sic] members" is not sufficient.  Some of the list
> members might well be interested in, say, information about candidates in
> the upcoming election in Ohio.  Or my poetry (they'd have extraordinarily
> poor taste if they were, but I digress).  But this list is not the place for
> those things, and I assume you would agree.  The fact that the speakers
> "know a thing or two about Java" is also not sufficient -- I know a thing or
> two about Java, but I didn't invite this list to my recent training on how
> to win an election campaign, because it's not related to the purpose of the
> list.
>
>  You lose points for self-promotion, since you're involved with the
> conference -- someone who had no self-interest would have a stronger
> argument for bringing up "hey, I heard about this thing -- I know it's a
> little off-topic, but I'm going, and it looks like Bruce Tate is coming.
> I've read his books and they're interesting."
>
>  So the question is, is it relevant enough?  My vote would actually be "no."
>  Then I would add that opening any list to be a vehicle for self-promotion
> would, I fear, quickly cause self-promotion to outrun ordinary list traffic,
> so I'd especially vote "no" here.
>
>  That said (writing to everyone else here), there are really no rules on the
> use of this list (that I know of) -- maybe we could make some?
>
>  -- David.
>
>
>
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