Last evening was very nice. We usually have a good time at the Rails meetups, hosted by Valtech. Yesterday it started out with Dr Nic William, who spoke about some metaprogramming techniques. Very neat, and the best part was his Magic Wiggly Lines. I'm not sure if it's genius or mental. But it's cool, at least; it's basically a const_missing hook, which makes it possible to use class names even if you spell them wrong. Hehe.
After that I spoke about new JRuby thing. I have a cold, so I took it pretty easy, and it was very free form with questions. There was many interesting questions, actually, and I think Nic taped it all...
After that, we drank beer and talked technology, which is always fun!
onsdag, mars 21, 2007
söndag, mars 18, 2007
Rails meet in Stockholm
And it's time again for a Rails meetup in Stockholm, at Valtech. This Tuesday (20th) 6pm at Valtechs offices. It is usually very interesting and neat to meet other people involved in Rails and Ruby here in Stockholm, and it's usually very nice, all around.
I will have a short presentation on the new features in JRuby 0.9.8. I will provide a fast intro to JRuby, but this is not the introductionary presentation; I will also try a somewhat different presentation technique, so it is sure to be interesting. At least for me... =)
Show up! It's worth it. You need to reserve a place, though, which can be done at http://www.rails.se/rails/show/Railstr%C3%A4ff+20+Mars+2007
I will have a short presentation on the new features in JRuby 0.9.8. I will provide a fast intro to JRuby, but this is not the introductionary presentation; I will also try a somewhat different presentation technique, so it is sure to be interesting. At least for me... =)
Show up! It's worth it. You need to reserve a place, though, which can be done at http://www.rails.se/rails/show/Railstr%C3%A4ff+20+Mars+2007
fredag, mars 16, 2007
ThoughtWorks
I have resigned from my position at Karolinska Institutet. Instead, I will work for ThoughtWorks. I am extremely excited about this, obviously. I will start in London in the beginning of June. I'll stay in London for 6 months and then move to the San Francisco office.
As you may know, ThoughtWorks is doing lots of Ruby projects in the enterprise and are really helping spread Ruby to the masses. And that's what I will be working with. Ruby and JRuby for ThoughtWorks.
What's more, I will be doing development on the JRuby core at ThoughtWorks!
As an aside, I would like to mention two very interesting things that TW have announced very recently. First, CruiseControl.rb, which looks very nice, and secondly, Mingle. Both of these products have great potential.
I'm just so excited about this!
As you may know, ThoughtWorks is doing lots of Ruby projects in the enterprise and are really helping spread Ruby to the masses. And that's what I will be working with. Ruby and JRuby for ThoughtWorks.
What's more, I will be doing development on the JRuby core at ThoughtWorks!
As an aside, I would like to mention two very interesting things that TW have announced very recently. First, CruiseControl.rb, which looks very nice, and secondly, Mingle. Both of these products have great potential.
I'm just so excited about this!
måndag, mars 12, 2007
JRuby Regular Expressions
The Regular Expression support in JRuby is about to be revamped. I will here detail my plans for this work, and also some of the reasons for it. This post is as much for people interested in JRuby, as for the JRuby developers.
Stage 0: java.util.regex
JRuby has traditionally used java.util.regex. We stopped doing that March 11:th, 2007. The main reasons are because of the disconnect with MRI. Some of the operators work very differently, there are some problems with UTF-8, we can't support SJIS or EUC, nor posix-classes. And java.util.regex also uses a recursive implementation which means it can't handle certain large inputs. Further, we would like to be able to modify the implementation to work with the same stuff that backs the RubyString, to increase performance.
Stage 1: JRegex
Yesterday (March 11:th), I merged JRegex as the main regular expression engine for JRuby. The main reasons for this is twofold. First, we can change the implementation quite easily, and second, it is an iterative algorithm, which means it doesn't fail on the input that java.util.regex does. Since this caused problems with some Rails tests (and also in multipart handling in all libraries using cgi), I decided to merge this as a stopgap until the next incarnation of regex support.
Stage 2: REJ
In about 2 weeks, I hope to be able to merge REJ with JRuby. At the point of merging, it should be a better replacement than both JRegex and java.util.regex. REJ is a project I've started, which will be a direct port of the MRI 1.8.6 regular expression engine. The important thing about this is that the semantics for JRuby will match MRI very closely. We will be able to match UTF-8, SJIS and EUC regular expressions, and we are able to have the same quirks as MRI, even though people shouldn't depend on such quirks. In the process of writing REJ, I will also create a large suite of test cases for regular expressions, based on Henry Spencer's test files. I'll probably submit something initial to a separate repository very soon. If I get my wish, REJ is what will be the regular expression engine for JRuby 1.0.
Stage 3: Ojiguruma
After 1.0 has been released, I think it's time to make the Regexp engine in JRuby really extensible, and provide an interface from Ruby to change which engine to use. After that is done, I would be very interested in doing a port of Oniguruma to Java, which would give us far better multilanguage support, and also some interesting features. The reason I'm choosing to not do this right now is because Oniguruma is just too large.
Stage 4: (No official name yet)
Another engine that some in the JRuby/Ruby community has started working on is an engine which will be based on Ragel for parsing and a modified version of Thompson NFA and TCL-style backreferences for matching. It's an interesting project but it will take some time before it's usable.
Stage 0: java.util.regex
JRuby has traditionally used java.util.regex. We stopped doing that March 11:th, 2007. The main reasons are because of the disconnect with MRI. Some of the operators work very differently, there are some problems with UTF-8, we can't support SJIS or EUC, nor posix-classes. And java.util.regex also uses a recursive implementation which means it can't handle certain large inputs. Further, we would like to be able to modify the implementation to work with the same stuff that backs the RubyString, to increase performance.
Stage 1: JRegex
Yesterday (March 11:th), I merged JRegex as the main regular expression engine for JRuby. The main reasons for this is twofold. First, we can change the implementation quite easily, and second, it is an iterative algorithm, which means it doesn't fail on the input that java.util.regex does. Since this caused problems with some Rails tests (and also in multipart handling in all libraries using cgi), I decided to merge this as a stopgap until the next incarnation of regex support.
Stage 2: REJ
In about 2 weeks, I hope to be able to merge REJ with JRuby. At the point of merging, it should be a better replacement than both JRegex and java.util.regex. REJ is a project I've started, which will be a direct port of the MRI 1.8.6 regular expression engine. The important thing about this is that the semantics for JRuby will match MRI very closely. We will be able to match UTF-8, SJIS and EUC regular expressions, and we are able to have the same quirks as MRI, even though people shouldn't depend on such quirks. In the process of writing REJ, I will also create a large suite of test cases for regular expressions, based on Henry Spencer's test files. I'll probably submit something initial to a separate repository very soon. If I get my wish, REJ is what will be the regular expression engine for JRuby 1.0.
Stage 3: Ojiguruma
After 1.0 has been released, I think it's time to make the Regexp engine in JRuby really extensible, and provide an interface from Ruby to change which engine to use. After that is done, I would be very interested in doing a port of Oniguruma to Java, which would give us far better multilanguage support, and also some interesting features. The reason I'm choosing to not do this right now is because Oniguruma is just too large.
Stage 4: (No official name yet)
Another engine that some in the JRuby/Ruby community has started working on is an engine which will be based on Ragel for parsing and a modified version of Thompson NFA and TCL-style backreferences for matching. It's an interesting project but it will take some time before it's usable.
Two more days in Kraków
I was very lazy on Saturday. Took it very easy, then went to a dinner with some of the presenters and organizers for SFI. And after that I gave my presentation, which I personally felt went very well. I had to adapt the technical level some, because it seemed most of the audience didn't know much about compilers. After that, Lukas held his presentation about Seaside, which also went well.
Then we celebrated. Then there was headache. And a look at the Cathedral. And a taxi driver who didn't understand one word of English. And he took me to the wrong terminal at the airport. But I finally got on the right flight and got home.
Then we celebrated. Then there was headache. And a look at the Cathedral. And a taxi driver who didn't understand one word of English. And he took me to the wrong terminal at the airport. But I finally got on the right flight and got home.
fredag, mars 09, 2007
Two days in Kraków
So, I've been in Kraków for two days now. I will fly back on Sunday. It's a very interesting town. On one part, it's lovely. The buildings are absolutely amazing, and very beautiful. On the other hand, many of them are very run down, and the wear and tear is obvious all around. To me, the whole town seems sort of depressing, but on the other hand the people here are very up beat, and from some of the presentations I've seen, the technological future for Kraków looks very bright indeed.
I haven't really been able to see most of the presentations. Almost all have been in Polish, sadly enough. I did see two interesting ones yesterday. The first was Michael Foords talk about IronPython. This was very neat and I've talked some with him after that too. I'll get back to that. The other talk was about Google Ads, by Greg Badros. As always, hearing about how Google does things internally is always amazingly interesting. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the machine learning and NLP stuff they're doing, but obviously they can't discuss that too much.
Today I haven't been able to see any presentation, due to Polish. On the other hand me, Michael and Lukas Renggli have had some very interesting discussions both yesterday and today. Now, the company Michael's part of has the largest IronPython code base in the world, as far as I understand it. It's basically 90 000 LOC, where 20 000 is production code and 70 000 are testing code. That sounds about right... =)
Lukas Renggli is one of the core developers of Seaside, a framework which I'm quite fond of. What we three have in common is our interest in dynamic languages, so we had some very common ground to talk about. What's nice is that many of the things Michael talked about in his presentation is stuff we in JRuby also speak much about. In the same manner, it seems the IronPython guys have had basically the same problems we in JRuby has had. It seems there is some common ground to be found here, and possibly also a basis for conversations. I for one would find that very interesting, since I enjoy hearing about dynamic languages getting foot holds on statically typed virtual machines; that is just such a sweet spot.
Tomorrow evening is my talk. I'm going to be at an official dinner in the middle of the day, and then get over to the conference and give my presentation at 17:00. I think it's going to be interesting, and it will be an obvious counterpart to Michael's talk, since the reason for existing is so similar for IronPython and JRuby. It will be interesting to see how the audience react.
After that, I'll see Lukas talk about Seaside, and after that people are talking about having a party, so tomorrow will be quite intense. And finally, on Sunday I'm going back to Sweden. As far as I know now, I won't travel that much for at least a month now, which feels sort of nice. This week has been far to intense, and also have had some really great - but tiring - moments.
I haven't really been able to see most of the presentations. Almost all have been in Polish, sadly enough. I did see two interesting ones yesterday. The first was Michael Foords talk about IronPython. This was very neat and I've talked some with him after that too. I'll get back to that. The other talk was about Google Ads, by Greg Badros. As always, hearing about how Google does things internally is always amazingly interesting. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the machine learning and NLP stuff they're doing, but obviously they can't discuss that too much.
Today I haven't been able to see any presentation, due to Polish. On the other hand me, Michael and Lukas Renggli have had some very interesting discussions both yesterday and today. Now, the company Michael's part of has the largest IronPython code base in the world, as far as I understand it. It's basically 90 000 LOC, where 20 000 is production code and 70 000 are testing code. That sounds about right... =)
Lukas Renggli is one of the core developers of Seaside, a framework which I'm quite fond of. What we three have in common is our interest in dynamic languages, so we had some very common ground to talk about. What's nice is that many of the things Michael talked about in his presentation is stuff we in JRuby also speak much about. In the same manner, it seems the IronPython guys have had basically the same problems we in JRuby has had. It seems there is some common ground to be found here, and possibly also a basis for conversations. I for one would find that very interesting, since I enjoy hearing about dynamic languages getting foot holds on statically typed virtual machines; that is just such a sweet spot.
Tomorrow evening is my talk. I'm going to be at an official dinner in the middle of the day, and then get over to the conference and give my presentation at 17:00. I think it's going to be interesting, and it will be an obvious counterpart to Michael's talk, since the reason for existing is so similar for IronPython and JRuby. It will be interesting to see how the audience react.
After that, I'll see Lukas talk about Seaside, and after that people are talking about having a party, so tomorrow will be quite intense. And finally, on Sunday I'm going back to Sweden. As far as I know now, I won't travel that much for at least a month now, which feels sort of nice. This week has been far to intense, and also have had some really great - but tiring - moments.
tisdag, mars 06, 2007
Tomorrow is today - or from London to Stockholm to Krakow
Part I: London
I got up at 5am, got dressed and packed and headed of to the airport. Finally got on the plane to London (thank god for online check-in) and tried to get some work done. That didn't go very well, but I got to read some instead. I'm rereading Ubik. Classic. Landed at Heathrow about 10 minutes behind schedule. Ran to the Piccadilly line, tried to talk with people in Sweden, but the connection was kinda bad. Arrived at Covent Garden, walked in brisk pace to the place of my meeting. Finally arrived, 5 minutes late, to find out there was no hurry. Sat down and had a pleasant chat with Dan North and Simon Stewart. Very nice. (Hey Dan, if you read this, get in touch when you're in Stockholm for ExpertZone. I know places with good beer.).
Then, Lunch. Haha. What a joke. I found a place that seemed to offer great vegetarian burgers, so I settled down for a quorn burger and some British chips. After 15 minutes waiting I got told the grill wouldn't light up. Lucky me. Instead, I had to make do with a Pret sandwich and a spicy vegetable Cornish pasty (someone told me it was the day of the Cornish patron saint yesterday, so I guess that fits). A few minutes walk on Oxford street was nice. I got photographed by some guys from an Austrian fashion magazine. Then back for the real meeting.
Cyndi Mitchell is a very formidable person. I was impressed. We had a 2 hour talk; very interesting. I will tell you all about it as soon as I can. But suffice to say, I was very happy when I left. Until I realized that I had exactly 2 hours until my flight taxed out from Heathrow. So, back to Covent Garden. Back on the underground. Which through some bad communication on the drivers part, almost ended badly when the train reached the end stop before Heathrow. Thanks to the people who told me to get of the train and switch to the other side. =) I finally got to Terminal 3, realized I already had a boarding card, found my way to the security check, got my boots scanned two times, and found the gate about 20 times before takeoff. Of course, as soon as the aircraft had taxed out, the flight management decided that we should stay 30 minutes on ground before finally taking off towards Copenhagen. It's a wonder I actually got there in time. So, in Copenhagen I walked 2 klicks to the transfer center, got a new boarding card and walked back to almost the exact place I started from, got on my flight to Stockholm and finally landed. Wow.
Airport coach to Stockholm city, and night bus home to my dear old mental hospital. When I finally got to bed I ached all over, and had been awake and active for 22 hours solid. Sleep was nice at that point. Especially since the day had been a success on all accounts.
Part II: Stockholm
I finally woke up, took care of mail and told everyone about London. Thought I'd take it easy, maybe practice on my presentation for Saturday, possibly start writing on the presentations for the CS course I'm going to speak for this April. But alas, after some mailing with Poland, I realized I've made a big mistake. I thought I was going to Kraków this Friday, and staying until Sunday. That's not entirely right. I'm actually going tomorrow. Surprise!
So.
Part III: Kraków
As mentioned above, I'll land in Kraków tomorrow (Wednesday) evening. This is good in several ways. I will have a chance to see the city, and I will have the opportunity to see some more presentations at the conference I'm at. There are many interesting things to be had; I'm sad half of them are in Polish. I guess I can look at the slides and have some fun trying the guess the meaning. I am going to see the talks about IronPython, Google Ads and Seaside. And, of course, if anyone is nearby and would like to take a beer and talk computers, programming languages, AI, or whatnot, please hit me a mail, or a comment on this post. My evenings will be mostly free it seems.
That is, unless someone knows any good clubs with nice music; especially electronic stuff and/or postpunk, new wave, darkwave or gothy things.
Anyway. Time to sleep.
I got up at 5am, got dressed and packed and headed of to the airport. Finally got on the plane to London (thank god for online check-in) and tried to get some work done. That didn't go very well, but I got to read some instead. I'm rereading Ubik. Classic. Landed at Heathrow about 10 minutes behind schedule. Ran to the Piccadilly line, tried to talk with people in Sweden, but the connection was kinda bad. Arrived at Covent Garden, walked in brisk pace to the place of my meeting. Finally arrived, 5 minutes late, to find out there was no hurry. Sat down and had a pleasant chat with Dan North and Simon Stewart. Very nice. (Hey Dan, if you read this, get in touch when you're in Stockholm for ExpertZone. I know places with good beer.).
Then, Lunch. Haha. What a joke. I found a place that seemed to offer great vegetarian burgers, so I settled down for a quorn burger and some British chips. After 15 minutes waiting I got told the grill wouldn't light up. Lucky me. Instead, I had to make do with a Pret sandwich and a spicy vegetable Cornish pasty (someone told me it was the day of the Cornish patron saint yesterday, so I guess that fits). A few minutes walk on Oxford street was nice. I got photographed by some guys from an Austrian fashion magazine. Then back for the real meeting.
Cyndi Mitchell is a very formidable person. I was impressed. We had a 2 hour talk; very interesting. I will tell you all about it as soon as I can. But suffice to say, I was very happy when I left. Until I realized that I had exactly 2 hours until my flight taxed out from Heathrow. So, back to Covent Garden. Back on the underground. Which through some bad communication on the drivers part, almost ended badly when the train reached the end stop before Heathrow. Thanks to the people who told me to get of the train and switch to the other side. =) I finally got to Terminal 3, realized I already had a boarding card, found my way to the security check, got my boots scanned two times, and found the gate about 20 times before takeoff. Of course, as soon as the aircraft had taxed out, the flight management decided that we should stay 30 minutes on ground before finally taking off towards Copenhagen. It's a wonder I actually got there in time. So, in Copenhagen I walked 2 klicks to the transfer center, got a new boarding card and walked back to almost the exact place I started from, got on my flight to Stockholm and finally landed. Wow.
Airport coach to Stockholm city, and night bus home to my dear old mental hospital. When I finally got to bed I ached all over, and had been awake and active for 22 hours solid. Sleep was nice at that point. Especially since the day had been a success on all accounts.
Part II: Stockholm
I finally woke up, took care of mail and told everyone about London. Thought I'd take it easy, maybe practice on my presentation for Saturday, possibly start writing on the presentations for the CS course I'm going to speak for this April. But alas, after some mailing with Poland, I realized I've made a big mistake. I thought I was going to Kraków this Friday, and staying until Sunday. That's not entirely right. I'm actually going tomorrow. Surprise!
So.
Part III: Kraków
As mentioned above, I'll land in Kraków tomorrow (Wednesday) evening. This is good in several ways. I will have a chance to see the city, and I will have the opportunity to see some more presentations at the conference I'm at. There are many interesting things to be had; I'm sad half of them are in Polish. I guess I can look at the slides and have some fun trying the guess the meaning. I am going to see the talks about IronPython, Google Ads and Seaside. And, of course, if anyone is nearby and would like to take a beer and talk computers, programming languages, AI, or whatnot, please hit me a mail, or a comment on this post. My evenings will be mostly free it seems.
That is, unless someone knows any good clubs with nice music; especially electronic stuff and/or postpunk, new wave, darkwave or gothy things.
Anyway. Time to sleep.
JRuby 0.9.8 is here
The JRuby team is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 0.9.8.
Download at: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/
This release has some great improvements:
The amount of IRC conversations, mailing list threads, bug reports, patches, and blog entries in the community has been a great help and our community is really making a huge difference in how fast JRuby is improving. The amount of progress is really staggering!
If you have ever thought that JRuby wasn't mature enough, I would like to contradict that now. With this release we are better than ever.
More information can be found at http://www.jruby.org.
Download at: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/
This release has some great improvements:
- Ruby on Rails support. We have been working hard on getting Rails own unit tests running and over 98% of them now run successfully. We feel things are running well enough to invite Ruby users to kick the tires and help root out any final issues.
- Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and override methods
- New Java primitive array syntax
- Reimplementation of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more correct and performant
- Significant bottlenecks have been identified. In some cases IO is 6.5x faster than previous releases. Java included classes are significantly faster than in the past.
- 220 Jira issues resolved since last release
The amount of IRC conversations, mailing list threads, bug reports, patches, and blog entries in the community has been a great help and our community is really making a huge difference in how fast JRuby is improving. The amount of progress is really staggering!
If you have ever thought that JRuby wasn't mature enough, I would like to contradict that now. With this release we are better than ever.
More information can be found at http://www.jruby.org.
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