On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Charles Oliver N.
[email protected] wrote:
JRuby talks have been in a room that seats 1500), stop by
Oracle Java Technologies | Oracle and give it a shot. There’s a whole world of
developers there (15k people at JavaOne last year) that really need to learn
Ruby.
Hi Charles,
I am not in the community or anything, but one thing I have
noticed in porting
my old Java skills over to Ruby is that you hit a lot of barriers and
have to do a
lot of yak shaving.
Most people are sold on the core message that Ruby/JRuby and Java is a
strong combination and it is worth investing in, but hit snags when they
try
and port over their concepts. There is a lot of work to retool their
infrastructure,
and not a lot of documentation, and productive Java teams need to invest
heavily
in infrastructure (build systems, CI, ant/maven/testing) in order to
be productive.
Even basic things like how you lay out your Ruby projects, produce gems,
use
gems and jars together etc. Is not well documented. Theres plenty of
tools out there,
but you have to find them, and most people coming to Ruby from Java
would probably
expect that their investment in learning Ruby, would go into the
‘making features’ bit -
Rails, Merb, RSpec, Haml, Monkeybars etc. And not scratching their
head as to how to
lay out big projects, get tests to work, relearn build systems
(ant,maven → rake/buildr).
That stuff isn’t fun in any language, and a lot of converts get bummed
at this stage.
A talk on this, ‘The Migration Dilemna’ that attempts to help out
people who are curious
would probably be very beneficial right about now. You could cover the
things that
really need to be known - Rake basics, Ruby project layout (e.g. with
Bones) and making
your own gems. Also, introducing the various JRuby bridges is
essential - how to make
Java and Ruby work together in common scenarios (like jruby-rack,
warbler, glassfish-gem).
You could deal with bootstrapping applications with JRuby from either
way, like having Ruby
launch Java or Java instantiate Ruby. And you would need to cover the
various tools that allow
you to keep your existing investment in build systems and tests, but
call it from Ruby
(JTestR, rake with ant support and buildr/raven).
Its just a thought, but I think the time is right for a piece like
this - something that ties together
the various pieces of the puzzle. Its beyond my ability to do this (I
hack on JRuby in my spare time,
hoping I can get my skills good enough to apply them to legacy
applications at work). But there
must be a lot more people in my situation - trying to leverage JRuby
and Ruby to help out their
Java projects that are losing steam. Its actually easier to make the
switch entirely to something
like Rails and just War it up in the end, than it is to solve all of
the smaller problems that
prevent you from introducing pieces of Ruby into existing Java code
seamlessly.
regards,
Richard.
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I think this will be a great year for JRuby…we have