Devoxx: JRuby by Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo

Charles and Thomas did a good job in getting the java-audience in touch with ruby's beauty. The demos looked really slick and development seems very efficient and intuitive. I still have the impression though that ruby works best if you completely adhere and embrace ruby's principles. The trouble starts when you want to take slightly different approaches than the 'sensible defaults'.

Some (J)Ruby's features:

• closures
• operator overloading
• Ruby Gems is the repository
• 'module' = mixins of scala

Ruby on Rails web development platform:

• convention over configuration
• DRY don't repeat yourself
• 'agile': hot deploy, generate basic structure
• persistence: ActiveRecord (=driven by DB structure)
• rhtml + partial rhtml = (sort of similar to) jsp and jspf
• multi-format support: e.g. xml and html based on http accept header
• warble: create standard WAR based on bundle

examples of sites using JRuby:

• http://kenai.com/
• https://mix.oracle.com/
• http://www.trisano.org/
• http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-agile-project-management

references:

• http://www.devoxx.com/display/JV08/JRuby
• http://jruby.codehaus.org/