JvYAML, RbYAML and JRuby

There has been much activity on several points these last weeks, but the guiding light has been on getting JRuby as good as possible. JRuby 0.9 will arrive sometime this or next week, and to that point I managed to rework the emitter in RbYAML and release version 0.2 a few days ago. This release will be a part of JRuby 0.9. About 10 days ago I finished the parser implementation for JvYAML and released version 0.1 of it.

Today I've spent some time working on porting the emitter from RbYAML to Java too, but I haven't really gotten that far yet. I hope I can get it finished in time for JRuby 0.9, but it's no big catastrophe if not. The essential part with YAML emitting is that it's correct, not fast. But it would be really nice to get it included in this major release too. We'll have to see.

I realize I haven't really blogged about neither RbYAML 0.2 or JvYAML, just announcing them. But don't worry, it will arrive shortly.

As for now, the more interesting thing is JRuby. The 0.9 release will contain some truly spectacular things, and I'm prepared to say that JRuby is now usable in many commercial environments. We have RubyGems working correctly (albeit slowly, right now), we have the initial parts of Rails, we have the ActiveRecord JDBC connector, we have massive speed improvements. We have also received official sanctioning from Matz to include C Ruby's core libraries in the JRuby distribution (this means we no longer have to hack fileutils.rb each time checking out a new copy of JRuby). The IO work from Evan Buswell means Webrick will very soon work correctly from JRuby. All in all, it's a really major improvement, and I'm proud of being part of it. Stay tuned for more info.