From: Michael Neumann <mneumann@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T22:32:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Groovy: your perspective

Am Dienstag, 14. April 2009 11:09:10 schrieb Charles Oliver Nutter:
> 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.

That's good news. They should have opened Java 10 years ago :)
I fear you need bootstraps to be able to compile that, which are 
binaries, so again it's limited to some more widely used OSes. And this 
will probably take hours to compile.

> >> 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.

Thanks. I forgot to mention that the experience I made with Java lies  
two years in the past :)

My point was, that while there are a lot libraries for Java, not all of 
them are usable (the same applies to Ruby of course). 
Btw, IIRC tagsoup somehow incorrectly converted UTF-16
(I forgot the exact details), so that in the end all umlauts were lost.

Regards,

  Michael