Forum: JRuby Help needed: Hacking JRuby in Berlin

Hi JRubyists,

I voiced some concerns about the state of some JRuby libraries on 
Twitter a few days ago[1]. Being someone that uses many nuances of Ruby, 
I still run into JRuby<>MRI problems on a regular basis, mostly due to 
library issues in JRuby-specific libraries like 
activerecord-jdbc-adapter, not due to the base system itself. Often, 
those problems are already known or reported, but unfixed - and 
sometimes need some effort. Also, some of those libraries require 
special knowledge e.g., database specifics or details of JRuby.

I would like to start a series of Ruby Hackdays to improve the Ruby 
ecosystem under the umbrella of Ruby Berlin e.V.. For the reasons stated 
above, I would like to pick the JRuby ecosystem as our first project to 
hack on. The goal of the first day is to get new hackers educated about 
JRuby, provide them with worthwhile projects to work on, get them up to 
speed and also to motivate them to work on the "boring" parts[2] from 
time to time. If the day is a success, I'd like to do rerun it 
regularly.

This is going to happen soon: We do have a room and will have a date set 
by the next Ruby Usergroup Berlin meeting (10th of January) - expect it 
to be at the end of January, beginning of February.

What we do need is support by project maintainers providing tasks and 
maybe documenting their pain points with the project[3]. If you read 
this mail and lead a JRuby project or a project with JRuby issues, 
please get in contact with me - I'd like to compile a list of things for 
attendees to get started with quickly. Also, depending on the date, it 
would be nice if some support on IRC or github issues could be given to 
those getting started with new things.

My current list is:

- activerecord-jdbc-adapter, especially on Oracle (in that case, along 
with oracle-enhanced) is somewhat behind the current Rails 
state-of-the-art and sometimes buggy because of that
- warbler has a long issue list
- Generally, I find the documentation about Java-to-JRuby-integration 
lacking. While there are big projects using it around (like Nokogiri), 
it is hard to find guidelines.
- On a similar note, I find documentation of actual differences between 
MRI and JRuby lacking.
- Finally, Kernel.spawn is a fake in JRuby ;).
- At least in my case, Bundler and the asset pipeline seem slower than 
on MRI, I'd like to investigate that

Regards,
Florian Gilcher <florian.gilcher@asquera.de>

[1] https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/279650537652248576
https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/279676648700399616
[2] Yes, Oracle is not fun :).
[3] Just a statement like: "Does not work well in 1.9-mode" or 
something, nothing big.

Florian -

Great that you're doing this.

Do you have any plans to make your meetings available via Google 
Plus/Hangout?

Also, regarding JRuby informationalthough it's not free, the JRuby book 
"Using JRuby" (http://pragprog.com/book/jruby/using-jruby) was really 
helpful for me.  Did you mean something more detailed and low level 
implementation oriented?

- Keith

---
Keith R. Bennett
http://about.me/keithrbennett

Hi Keith,

thanks for your interest.

I haven't thought about options for making those meetings available 
online, but I'd definitely like to make it possible for others to 
interact with us. I'll keep you posted.

About the JRuby book: its definitely a good piece, but I wouldn't count 
it as "readily available and open" documentation when all you want to do 
is a minor integration. Its definitely a recommendation for Pros :).

Regards,
Florian Gilcher

Florian,  if you generate a list of questions as a result of holding
these hackfests and especially if you see patterns of questions then
please forward them to the list or me and hopefully we can get answers
and probably improve documentation.    We really really need more
maintainers on some of these gems and probably more importantly we
need folks keeping most gem authors aware of the compatibility issues
between MRI/JRuby/rbx.  Thanks for starting these Hackdays. :)

-Tom

On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Florian Gilcher
<florian+jruby@asquera.de> wrote:
> My current list is:
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/279650537652248576
> https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/279676648700399616
> [2] Yes, Oracle is not fun :).
> [3] Just a statement like: "Does not work well in 1.9-mode" or something, 
nothing big.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from this list, please visit:
>
>     http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
>
>



--
blog: http://blog.enebo.com       twitter: tom_enebo
mail: tom.enebo@gmail.com