From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T18:09:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Groovy: your perspective

Michael Neumann wrote:
> 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 :)

http://robilad.livejournal.com/44589.html

I'm also running the BSD port of OpenJDK on Mac right now.

>> 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).

http://java-source.net/open-source/html-parsers

No promises, of course, but there's a lot more to pick from.

- Charlie