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JRuby is my favorite Java tool. It lets me wield the power of Java libraries while building tools and abstractions to speed development. On a current project, I’m using JAXB2 to bind a large set of deeply-nested XML Schemas into Java classes. I have a Rake task to create the classes from the xsd files…
This week one of our customers asked us to create a small, single-purpose tool to help support one of our JRuby desktop applications. The requirement was simple: make it easy to input minimum, maximum, and beta values into a beta distribution function for a few thousand samples and visualize the results. After a few hours…
Last week Software GR was lucky enough to host Charles Nutter. Charles is a principal on the JRuby project and has worked on JRuby for more than 4 years. This was a fantastic and in-depth technical talk ranging from an overview of the JVM’s “other” languages and then diving deep into the guts of what…
Why in the world would you want to embed JRuby into your application instead of relying on a regular Ruby or JRuby installation? I can think of three reasons. Note: this is a sister post to my description of the arguments needed to run JRuby via jruby-complete. Here I discuss the rationale for using JRuby…
One of the great things about the JRuby project is that it’s easy to run Ruby programs without installing Ruby. In fact, you don’t even need to install JRuby. All you need is a JVM runtime and jruby-complete. Rationale Check out this other post for a discussion of my reasons for locking down your JRuby…
Last weekend I attended JRubyConf 2009. Overall I enjoyed the opening JRubyConf State of the Union, the follow-up JRuby on Rails, and the concluding JRuby Core Team Panel sessions the best. Despite browsing the JRuby mailing list as part of my daily routine, JRuby has a rapid development cycle; these sessions helped me get a…
Demetrius Nunes recently posted about his Swinger library to the JRuby mailing list. Swinger uses Cucumber and Jemmy to provide a test harness for automating Swing tests. I responded to Demetrius letting him know how great it is to hear others are interested in automating Swing testing. We’ve been using a combination of FEST and…
Atomic has been using JRuby, several Java libraries, and Jar Jar Links to distribute five different Ruby desktop applications (read: not Rails applications) as single, executable jar files. UPDATE (Jan. 30, 2009): Our client has cleared us to spill our guts on the details of the desktop apps discussed here now that the first is…
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…
Is JRuby a realistic candidate for authoring complex desktop applications? Yes. UPDATE (Jan. 30, 2009): Our client has cleared us to spill our guts on the details of the project discussed here now that it’s complete… Ruby for Desktop Applications? Yes we can.
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object