Bringing Ruby and Rails to the JVM

The Ruby programming language has exploded in popularity, spurred in part by the agility of the Rails web framework. Rails has in turn changed the way we look at web development. The two together are forcing developers to rethink how applications should be written. The world is changing. JRuby aims to bring Ruby to Java developers and provide an alternative platform for Ruby developers. In this presentation Thomas and Charles explain Ruby and show what makes it great, demonstrate how JRuby brings Ruby to Java and Java to Ruby, explore how JRuby on Rails brings agile web development to Java EE and Java EE's best features to Rails, and discuss the future of Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages on the JVM.

Thomas Enebo is project manager and a developer of the open source project JRuby. He is a developer at the University of Minnesota and a consultant with Aandtech Inc. Tom has been using Java in some fashion since its first public beta release. He became interested in Ruby after seeing an elegant re-implementation of some Perl code. Tom joined the JRuby project some time in late 2002.

Charles Nutter has been a Java developer since 1996, recently working as the senior Java architect at Ventera Corp and in September moved to Sun to work full-time on JRuby! He led the open-source LiteStep project in the late 90s and came to Ruby in the fall of 2004. Since then he has been a member of the JRuby team, helping to make it a true alternative Ruby platform. Charles presented JRuby at RubyConf 2005 and co-presented at JavaOne 2006 with Thomas Enebo. He hopes to co-write a JRuby book this fall with Thomas to follow up a planned JRuby 1.0 release. Charles currently works on a Ventera contract for the USDAs Food and Nutrition Service at their office in Minneapolis.