Hpricot goodness

This is just so cool, I cannot contain it. For those of you who haven't heard about Hpricot, it is one of why the lucky stiff's incredibly cool tools (which he probably will use to take over the world any day now...). It's HTML parsing goodness, very flexible, with the goal of being able to parse (and fix) everything that Firefox handles.

"So what?" you're probably asking... Well, Hpricot uses Ragel and some C code to achieve blinding speed. This means JRuby can't run it. Or I should say couldn't run it:

orpheus:~/workspace/jruby> jruby bin/gem install hpricot --source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net
Select which gem to install for your platform (java)
1. hpricot 0.5.110 (jruby)
2. hpricot 0.5.110 (mswin32)
3. hpricot 0.5.110 (ruby)
4. hpricot 0.5 (ruby)
5. hpricot 0.5 (mswin32)
6. hpricot 0.5.0 (ruby)
7. hpricot 0.5.0 (mswin32)
8. hpricot 0.4.99 (ruby)
9. hpricot 0.4.99 (mswin32)
10. hpricot 0.4.92 (ruby)
11. hpricot 0.4.92 (mswin32)
12. Skip this gem
13. Cancel installation
> 1
Successfully installed hpricot-0.5.110-jruby
Installing ri documentation for hpricot-0.5.110-jruby...
Installing RDoc documentation for hpricot-0.5.110-jruby...

That's right, Hpricot is now more promiscuous than any other gem with native parts.
What can you do with it? Well, I'm just going to point you to _why's own description of it. All he says at http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ will work fine in JRuby!

How did this come to be? Well, me and _why did some joint hacking, which was helped along by the fact that Adrian Thurston (the genius behind Ragel) recently added Java support to it. So, basically, most of the Ragel definition is exactly the same for both the C and the Java versions. The native code has been factored out, and both versions are buildable with rake from _why's code repository.

This is important. Don't think anything else. This strategy will, and can, be used for other gems with native parts. It's just a question of time.