Really Radical Ruby

I had a very good time at FOSCON III with the Portland Ruby Brigade yesterday. There were lots of entertaining talks too. I would say that my "lightning talk" wasn't really a lightning talk at all. Unless you count the speed of my talking... I managed to race through all my 22 slides - all of them shock full with information - in the time alloted to me. Hopefully people learned something from it.

Chad Wathington demonstrated Mingle which also was very nice.

John Lam showed us a taste of IronRuby, and also talked some about the implementation particulars that made certain things faster in IronRuby than on MRI. Interesting stuff, but I'm looking forward to the full talk tomorrow.

Alan McKean from GemStone showcased GemStone/JRuby - still a work in progress though. For those of you who don't know what GemStone is, think extremely powerful object persistence. And they're building a new version for Ruby, on top of JRuby. Very cool.

I realized that there are a few points about JRuby that haven't been emphasized enough, though, so here is there executive summary bullet points:

• JRuby is totally Java compliant and runs on any Java.
• JRuby is 1.0
• JRuby supports Rails
• ThoughtWorks offers commercial support for JRuby
• JRuby performance is on par with the C implementation, on average.