J Ruby Whirlwind Tour

Ola Bini gave a whirlwind tour of JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. Some key points included: JRuby allows Ruby code to run on the Java virtual machine, taking advantage of features like native threading and access to Java libraries. It can run in several modes including interpreted, compiled, and just-in-time compiled. JRuby is commonly used to run Ruby on Rails applications, and tools like ActiveRecord-JDBC facilitate database access. Several other Ruby tools and frameworks like RSpec work with JRuby. Ola demonstrated several JRuby projects including Profligacy, Rubiq, and Swing wrappers. Future work includes finishing the compiler and exploring alternative interpreters like