JRuby RC2


The day before RailsConf started, me, Charles and Tom sat in the lobby of the Courtyard, coding away, fixing problems and pushing out something like 5 versions of 1.0RC2. But the final RC2 is really, really good. You should download it, test it, and if you’re at RailsConf, report any bugs you find and get a cool t-shirt! JRuby is really making a huge buzz at RailsConf right now, and it’s sort of overwhelming! I’m very happy about it, of course, and there is still some nice things happening. Yesterday, we got a small bug in truncating files fixed, which means exclusive file locking works now.

1.0 is looking really, really good. It should be out by the end of May, and it’s going to be a smash.



JRuby 0.9.9 released


The JRuby team is happy to announce that 0.9.9 has now been released. This release have seen much focus on compatibility with Ruby 1.8, and also making the Java Integration features more solid. We are gearing up for a 1.0-release, and 0.9.9 should be pretty close to what you can expect from 1.0, so now is the time to start testing your applications on JRuby in earnest.

Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

Some of the most important points of this release:

  • Major compatibility and performance overhaul of String, Array, Hash
  • Many YAML and Marshalling issues have been fixed
  • Java Integration overhaul fixing many outstanding issues
  • 180 Jira issues resolved
  • Several more bottlenecks removed
  • Rails applications like Mephisto and plugins like Goldberg are running without hitches
  • Performance has improved by 40% over 0.9.8 based on YARV benchmarks

In response to all the things that needs doing before 1.0, we have decide to add two new committers to the team. Marcin Mielżyński and Bill Dortch have both done some incredibly nice things for the JRuby project, and we’re very happy about them joining up as core developers.

In conjunction with 0.9.9, Rails-integration will see a new release, that improves many parts of it. Since we’ve actually started using Rails-integration in more places, we have also noticed things that need to be improved; the new release is very good.

ActiveRecord-JDBC 0.2.4 will also be released very soon. We have made some major changes, and much of the core have been rewritten. These changes make MySQL fully compatible with ActiveRecord, and we are working hard on improving support for other databases. Hopefully, the 0.2.4 release will mean Derby support is more or less complete too.



JRuby 0.9.1 released


We in the JRuby team are proud to announce the release of JRuby 0.9.1.

Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/.

This release contains numerous new features, fixes and improvements:

  • Overall performance is 50-60% faster than JRuby 0.9.0
  • Improved Rails support
  • New syntax for including Java classes into Ruby
  • New interpreter design
  • Refactoring of method dispatch, code evaluation, and block dispatch code
  • Parser performance enhancement
  • Rewriting of Enumerable, StringScanner and StringIO in Java
  • New experimental syntax for implementing interfaces
  • 86 Jira issues resolved since 0.9.0

This past months have been great for JRuby, and I know that it will get even better from now on. My personal goal for 0.9.2 is to have complete Java YAML support in, and a working OpenSSL library. Obviously, all bugs should be fixed too… =)