Talking more about JRuby

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

thing which impressed me most at your excellent mtn. west rubyconf talk
was the little swing demo: the ability to quickly (or more quickly)
write cross platform desktop applications is quite interesting. perhaps
i'm not the only one to consider that a fully ajaxified, or even single
page, desktop app offers little more, in some respects, than a java
application that connects to a central db.

so i'm primarily interested is seeing how we can use jruby to open up
new markets to ruby like desktop applications, running jruby in the
browser, etc. maybe jruby can bring back the applet!

Yeah, that's probably worth another thread. Ruby+Swing seems to be one
of the most popular uses for JRuby right now. There's something like 4
or 5 different Swing frameworks for Ruby as a result.

- Charlie

 

[ara.t.howard]

Ara, if you're at RubyConf this weekend, ask me about Monkeybars.

We at Rising Tide are doing interesting work with JRuby & Swing.

i hope to be - family life may intercede though... i'll know today/
tomorrow.

cheers.

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/

 

[James Britt]

I'd like to hear more about it too Maybe you could talk a bit about
it here?

I'll pester my fellow Risers to pipe up.

We have two R'Forge projects, Railgun and Monkeybars, that aim to make
doing GUI Java apps fun. That is, you don't write any Java, just
(J)Ruby. But among the things we've talked about is the idea of chubby
clients; apps that use the Internet and/or local networking to play
smarter. There's lots of opportunity for robust GUI apps that share
data, chat with peers, interact with Web services, and so on.

If there's a RejectConf this weekend we'll be sure to show something.
(David Koontz' proposal to talk about Railgun was among the rejected. )

 

[David Chelimsky]

I've been writing some jruby rspec acceptance/functional tests around an
existing swing application using the FEST/abbot java libraries to interact
with swing.

I'm quite happy to blog something about my discoveries, or the usage pattern
i took if people are interested.

I would LOVE to see this. Please, please do.

Cheers,
David

 

[pat eyler]

I'd like to hear more about it too Maybe you could talk a bit about
it here?

maybe you should submit a talk proposal for MWRC. Seriously,
we'd love to see a presentation like that.

 

[pat eyler]

I would LOVE to see this. Please, please do.

I don't know where you live Simon, but do consider putting in a
proposal to your local regional conference.

 

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

maybe you should submit a talk proposal for MWRC. Seriously,
we'd love to see a presentation like that.

I'm trending away from submitting application-related proposals myself.
I'm almost always heads-down working on JRuby, and there are others who
can promote specific frameworks on JRuby like Rails and Swing better
than I can.

So over the next year you'll probably see fewer
Rails/Swing/Whatever-specific talks from me and more "intro to JRuby"
and "advanced JRuby" stuff.

- Charlie

 

[Brian Adkins]

JRuby runs Rake, RubyGems, Rails, Mongrel, and nearly all pure-Ruby
libraries and apps that are out there. Compatibility has gotten closer
and closer to 100% over the past year.

I thought Mongrel was a Ruby / C hybrid. How does this run on JRuby -
using JNI?

 

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

I thought Mongrel was a Ruby / C hybrid. How does this run on JRuby -
using JNI?

Only a small portion of Mongrel is written in C; those bits have been
ported, and an upcoming release of Mongrel will have a JRuby
platform-specific gem available.

- Charlie

 

[Jörg W Mittag]

Only a small portion of Mongrel is written in C; those bits have been
ported, and an upcoming release of Mongrel will have a JRuby
platform-specific gem available.

To be more precise: the Mongrel HTTP parser is actually written in
Ragel (<http://WWW.CS.QueensU.Ca/~thurston/ragel/>), *not* in pure C.
Ragel is a DSL (or a compiler, depending on from which side you look)
for writing Finite State Machines for parsers. So, the main part is
actually the Ragel DSL and only the (small) embedded actions are
written in C. The nice thing is that Ragel actually has multiple
backends, so it can not only compile to C, but to Java as well. So,
just by recompiling the Ragel source to Java, you can get the whole
State Machine scaffolding set up and only need to port the embedded
actions.

Interestingly, Ragel also has a Ruby backend: can you say
"Mongrelinius"?

BTW: Hpricot also uses Ragel, and it also has already been ported to
JRuby. (Other Ruby projects that use Ragel: RFuzz, SuperRedCloth, json
and LEL (from the JRuby Swing builder called Profligacy).)

jwm