From: Michael Neumann <mneumann@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T17:21:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Groovy: your perspective

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:34:45 +0900
James Britt <james.britt@gmail.com> wrote:

> Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> > Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> >> I followed Groovy development for a while (between 2004-2006) and 
> >> liked what I saw, but ultimately gave up on developing for the JVM
> >> and lost interest. Were it to break out of that particular ghetto
> >> I think it could gain in popularity, although from what I recall
> >> it's similar enough to Ruby in many respects that it might be
> >> difficult to differentiate itself.
> > 
> > I don't know if I'd consider the JVM a ghetto :) 
> 
> 
> In some ways MRI is more of a "ghetto" in that if you ever end up
> using a native-code library you may find it hard to run you code on
> multiple platforms, whereas if you use JRuby with Java libs you have
> far more portability.

Portability is very subjective :)
For many years, Java was only supported on a handful of platforms,
others like for example FreeBSD weren't (I'm talking about Sun's Java
here). 
I still can't run Java and depending applications like OpenOffice on a
specific operating system, until OpenJDK becomes ready.

Portability for me means, that I have full access to the C/C++ code, and
it compiles easily on every platform. Welcome to Ruby :)

> As it stands, it's a fair bet that Ruby + Java gives you more
> libraries than Ruby + C.

Sure. But does it give us more quality? My own (limited) experience
with Java was that it's very hard to find a usable, bug-free HTML parser
in Java (TagSoup without bugs), which on the other hand was very easy in
Ruby (Hpricot).

Regards,

  Michael