Editor's Daily Blog

Ruby, My Dear

More on JRuby and Sun

Last week, you'll recall the surprise announcement that the two primary JRuby developers are joining Sun. It's a particularly apt choice given the interest in Ruby from Java developers: it seems the one agile language with the greatest appeal to the Java mindset (I think Michael Ivey told me five years ago that I should give Ruby a try, that it was a natural fit for Java programmers). And honestly, would we be pining for closures in Java if they were they were the highlight of some uglier, scale-proof language like PHP or Perl?

So what are the JRuby guys going to be doing? In JRuby Love, Tim Bray says the JRuby guys will be working on JRuby full-time, but "they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have."

That rubbed ONJava blogger Timothy M. O'Brien the wrong way. In Sun hires JRuby Developers (to focus on developer tools?), he wrote:

WRONG, has he ever used RadRails, Eclipse, Komodo? Probably not, at Sun, the only IDE that exists is NetBeans, and I certainly hope tihs doesn't mean that Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo and going to be forced to work on the NetBeans team. I fear that might be the case. The one common theme I've noticed from Sun over the past few years is that they spend an irrational amount of time hyping NetBeans as the answer to every problem. I hope this is good news, and I hope that they didn't just hire the JRuby guys to be semi-junior developers on the NetBeans team.

Charles Nutter responded to this, which O'Brien quoted at length in a follow-up blog, Charles Nutter Responds: "our full-time responsibility is a solid JRuby 1.0". Nutter says:

Totally false. The principals at Sun…ALL the principals…have made it clear that our full-time responsibility is a solid JRuby 1.0 that can run the big popular Ruby apps (i.e. Rails, which necessitates Rake, IRB, RubyGems, Mongrel, and others). I've even gone as far as to say "I'd love to also help out language X" or "I'd also like to devote some cycles to working on C Ruby" and been told that JRuby should be my top priority. Time and time again, Sun folks are telling us and the general public that we're being hired to work on JRuby first. Trust me, if it weren't so, I'd tell you. I didn't leave one fulltime job that took away from JRuby to join another.

So there, apparently, is one fire out. Now for another: what about all the other dynamic languages? Where's the love (and Sun salaries) for those? Tim Bray addresses this point in Other Languages:

Following on our hiring the JRuby guys, I've had emails and links from representatives of pretty well every other dynamic language: Groovy, Python, Pnuts, you name it. All of them saying, more or less: "Why Ruby? There are other languages which are better (or better-integrated, or faster)." Some of them would like jobs (perfectly reasonable, we like getting that kind of email) and some of them would like Sun to assign money and resources to their language project (we like to hear about those ideas, too). So if you think those things should happen, I recommend looking at the JRuby situation for lessons.

Also in Java Today, the 10th Jini Community Meeting is underway in Brussels, Belgium. The wiki page 10th JCM Live is providing live updates with pictures, schedules, and a live video stream of the sessions (your QuickTime mileage may vary). The conference runs today and tomorrow.

In the 22-minute program NetBeans Podcast #14: Roman's report from Turkey, Gregg Sporar discusses the new NetBeans / JBoss Bundle, extensive list of NetBeans hacks, Sun hires two main JRuby developers, module of the week (Ant explorer from yWorks, new NetBeans Platform book, upcoming events and more...

David Herron discusses Bug tracking systems for use in open sourcing the JDK in today's Weblogs: "Hi all, as we're getting ready to start launching the open sourced JDK project we have a number of questions that are being pondered. The question at the top of my mind today is the bug tracking system. I would like to open up some discussion with you people as to what you find useful in a public bug tracking system."

In Internationalization 101: Setting up a fallback font, John O'Conner asks: "Have you ever seen a series of '????' or '□□□□' instead of the real characters you want? You need a font, maybe even a 'fallback' font."

Finally, in Java Episode VI : The Fanboy Menace, Simon Morris writes: "The debate about the old Java 5 and new Java 7 language features is an interesting one. And perfectly valid too. But I want to take a step back, and discuss the apparent overheated language-versus-language environment in which it is being conducted."

In today's Forums, tmarble responds to an offer of Windows-oriented JDK-building help in Re: How (Windows) developers can contribute to JDK 6 (Open Java): "Windows is a tricky platform (to build Java on) and we know we need to make it easier. (Disclaimer: I'm *not* a Windows build guru) The idea of a NetBeans plugin to make contribution easier makes a lot of sense. The word people used internally for that idea is 'wonderful'.. Of course the tool needs to help prepare the contribution for peer review, possibly with a test case and/or test >results... etc. etc. As we work out our contribution process (and tools) I really hope to get your feedback from the Windows perspective."

rbair is thinking bigger in Re: multiline label: "I've been thinking for a while about how to do HTML like layouts (that is page layouts. You could say this is like HTML, or you could say it is like print layouts that you might find in Adobe InDesign) in Swing. I've thought both about doing a custom LayoutManager, using a JEditorPane. The idea is to support not just wrapping text, but flowing text. Imagine a JComponent subclass that writes text in the background. But it does it such that if a child component is on the FlowingTextComponent, the text will either flow around the image, overwrite the image, or the image would obscure the text (depending on some layout constraints)."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• GemFire Enterprise 5.0
• YourKit Java Profiler 6.0-EAP-build1068
• SubEtha SMTP 1.0.4
• Terracotta for Spring Initial Release
• SQLiteJDBC 0.22
• Java Expression Language (JEXL) Announced

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to the java.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• September 12-14 - JavaZone 2006
• September 12-15 - Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop Chicago
• September 13-14 - 10th Jini Community Meeting
• September 15-17 - Pacific Northwest Software Symposium 2006
• September 22-24 - Western Canada Java Software Symposium 2006
• September 25-29 - Java Training Philippines
• September 29-October 1 - New England Software Symposium 2006: Fall Edition
• October 1-6 - JAOO
• October 3-4 - AjaxWorld Conference & Expo
• October 6-8 - Greater Atlanta Software Symposium 2006
• October 11 - NL-JUG: J-Fall
• October 13-15 - Bay Area Software Symposium 2006
• October 20-22 - Greater Toronto Software Symposium 2006
• October 23-25 - The Ajax Experience: Boston
• October 27-29 - Lone Star Software Symposium 2006: Dallas Edition

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

Comments

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.