Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium
March 2 - 4, 2007 - Milwaukee, WI
Charles Nutter
JRuby Contributor
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.
Presentations
Bringing Ruby & Rails to the JVM
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. With JRuby you're now able to run Rails apps alongside your existing Java applications, calling the same services and leveraging the same infrastructure. All the scalability, reliability, and performance of Enterprise Java is now available to Rails developers.
JRuby aims to bring Ruby on Rails to Java developers and provide an alternative platform for Ruby developers. In this session we'll 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.
We'll also talk about the status of JRuby on Rails, the current promise and perils of Rails on the JVM, and demonstrate bringing up a simple Rails app using JDBC for database access and calling into legacy services and APIs.
Become Super Powerful with JRuby
The explosion of popularity for dynamic languages on the JVM has changed the way we look at development. No longer is the Java platform tied to a single language, and no longer do you only have a single tool in your toolbox. Dynamic languages like Groovy, Python, Ruby, and others enable entirely new ways of solving our software problems. This session will explore one of those languages, Ruby, and show how it will make even complicated development tasks manageable and even fun.
JRuby is finally coming of age, presenting a viable new Ruby platform for both old and new Ruby developers. we'll first cover some basics about JRuby:
- History, including past design
- Current and future design plans
- Performance and compatibility metrics
- Where we go from here
JRuby also enables new ways of looking at programming on the Java platform. We'll look at some of the most popular:
- Calling Java APIs from Ruby code and implementing Java interfaces in Ruby
- Creating domain-specific languages to ease API use
- Metaprogramming in Ruby: fun and easy
- Interactive Java with the IRB console
