[ruby-talk:03864] Re: JRuby?

Hi,

"Aleksi Niemel" wrote
> Is there or will there be Ruby equivalent of JPython?
>
> I just happened to promote the use of JPython without having used such
beast
> myself. Ok, it was just a suggestion. But afterwards I realized I've
written
> a mail about this already: [ruby-talk:3561]. This should have been the
> *first* point under my earlier mail:
>
>     Why to stay away from Ruby?
>
>     - there's no support for Java integration (no JRuby)

That's only a good reason if you really need something like that. As Perl
has shown, there is an enormous amount of work out there that doesn't (not
to mention an enormous amount of work that would be better done in Ruby :-)

But if you think you really need it, the first question should be, what do
you want to accomplish?

JPython is certainly cool, but there are problems with this sort of
integration, because JVMs are generally only fairly well-debugged for byte
code sequences typical of Java compilers, not for other language compilers.
Judging from what I saw on their mail list many months ago, many folks had a
fairly rough time with it. At that time the main developer had moved on to
something else, so I don't know how well JPython is doing currently.
Hopefully others picked up the slack.

I'm not familiar with the latest Java additions for XML protocol support (or
whatever it should be called), but something like this may be a useful form
of integration in the long run for Ruby to work with. Then there's always
CORBA, but I don't know if anyone is doing much with this on the Ruby side.

Conrad