Integrating Java and Ruby with JRuby

I gave a talk at Calvin College last Thursday for a joint meeting of the Michigan Ruby Users Group and the Grand Rapids Java User’s Group.

My topic was using the Java integration features in JRuby. I’ve posted the slides here. If you didn’t attend you may find the slides a little terse. Nobody likes reading from slides, which often means that the resulting slides aren’t very informative for absentees.

After a brief introduction of using Java integration, I addressed a few of the tricks we learned while developing a large desktop application in JRuby from the ground up. This includes calling Java libraries, overriding Java classes, including functionality from Java into your Ruby classes, and how to make the Java API more ruby-like. Probably the most useful hint is the diagram and pointer to our technique for bundling JRuby apps into a monolithic jar.

There’s much more to Java integration than I have here; I only discussed the things that were ambiguous in the existing documentation or difficult to nail down. Comments are welcome so feel free to ask questions about the scanty slides.