From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T01:08:17+09:00
Subject: Re: String generalization called from JRuby

Howdy,

Charles O Nutter wrote:
> Forking the discussion a bit, but I'm interested in your use of JRuby here.
> It seems like a great idea to have little snippits of code that are easier
> to understand and maintain in Ruby, and be able to call them from Java with
> JRuby. Are you doing this already, or is this a first possible attempt at
> it?

Well, this will be my first attempt at JRuby - but this should not mean 
anything, as i begun to work with Ruby 2 weeks ago ;-) Nevertheless i 
can answer your question: I did this with Jython and i liked it. (I do 
not really like to code in java, (i prefer dynamically typed languages 
over statically typed ones) i am just doing it because i am working on a 
big project which is written in java.) So as soon as i can (and it makes 
sense) i am rushing to Jython/Jruby. (actually i like Ruby much more 
after 2 weeks than Python after 2 years ;-) So i will go with JRuby in 
the future. Actually JRuby is a clear winner in the compatibility issue 
imho (against Jython, which is faaaar from being Python2.4 compatible)

I think it is absolutely cool to do everything in JRuby which makes 
sense (i.e. to open a file, i will not go to JRuby - although after 5 
years as a Java professional i have to still look up the doc on how to 
open a file every time - not kidding here - so maybe this is not a bad 
idea either ;-) but operations which require string manipulation, 
regexps, lists, hashes, slicing, metaprogramming, can leverage blocks 
etc just to name a few are defintely ideal to be "outsorced" to JRuby.
Another ideal case is when the input and the output are both something 
simple (e.g. String -> String) - i.e. they are not depending heavily on 
non-built-in java objects.

My only problem is, that my other colleagues (and the company in 
general) is java only (although i am heavily sowing the seeds of Ruby 
also here ;-) and thus they do not really like the idea that someday 
they could possibly have to maintain Ruby code. So i am infiltrating our 
codebase slowly (and hope to reach a point one day where most of the 
code will be in Ruby ;-)

bw,
Peter