cookies and code

This is pretty much all I was able to accomplish over the last few days as it applies to JRuby. I haven’t dug into the Ruby language or Rails framework at all yet (besides the command “bin/rails myapplication”), but I’m loving playing with the tools JRuby provides to integrate with Java. Check this out:

jrubyc /mypath/myclass.rb

This is the command to compile Ruby code to Java byte-code. Ok, not that impressive, but just cool to write down. There is even a just-in-time compiler which ranks as extra cool. Check out this page in the JRuby wiki for more info.

I’m probably blowing the WAR magic out of proportion since it’s really just a glorified Ant task bundling up some dependencies for JEE servers to work with Rails. Here is the tutorial I used to create the WAR. I dropped it in Tomcat and it seemed to deploy w/o issue.

Maybe in a few days/weeks I’ll be able to figure out how to use the language and do something meaningful. In fact, my goal is to learn nothing about Ruby and just learn Rails. Ultimately, I can only hope to dream of the creation of the SPRUG (SPace coast Ruby Users Group) over here in Melbourne. With just the knowledge of Rails, I should be able to continue the tradition of Ruby UG’s everywhere. Just kidding fanboys! Keep “The Active-Record” alive and relax; I’m an idiot. I WAR’d an HTML file thinking it was a Rails app.

NOTE: Check out Charles Nutter’s blog if you get a chance. Since JRuby’s 1.0 release is coming soon they have a lot of fun runtime comparisons between regular old Ruby and JRuby. It’s a pretty good read from one of the head developers on the project.

OK, I shamelessly ripped off the “Come for the Java, stay for the Cocoa” line from some banner image I saw taken at an Apple conference. I’m moving on…

I was listening the the Java Posse this morning on my quick commute to work (Java Posse – Episode 111) and the topic was Withering Java. Who knows wtf that means. The whole podcast was about the functional programming paradigm (examples in Haskell) spawned by a talk at the Java Posse Roundup on the language Scala. You can read about Scala and Haskell at Wikipedia.

It was cool to hear about another paradigm besides the popular procedural and OO paradigms. I remember learning about functional languages in college, but doing very little (=nothing) with them. From what the panel was saying in the podcast, it seemed like functional languages are starting to be shaped by the more practical in the field of comp sci to be used in industry solutions. Although it seems like the paradigm has been around for like 15+ years, I’m encouraged to see it making its way out of academia.

The podcast went on to talk about how great it would be if it became common in shops for multi-language environments to spring up around a single VM, the JVM to be specific. One of the panel members kept going on about how he’d hire JRuby programmers for the presentation tier, Java developers for the application tier, and functional programmers for expert portions of the application tier and deploy everything to a JEE server. It was a good feeling to be able to say “HUZZAH!” in the car when I heard this. My co-workers and I have been using ColdFusion and Java in this fashion for a long while now. We have a separate architecture and implementation processes for Java and ColdFusion but everything deploys to JRun and potentially to any JEE server. I’m really hoping that with the release of JSE 6 that Adobe could utilize the new javax.script package to more fully integrate Java and ColdFusion. How nice would it be to plug a scripting engine for ColdFusion into your JEE server instead of running as a web app on a JEE server? All the sudden you have access to JTA, JNDI, and JMS resources with the ease of scripting in ColdFusion. Any issues ColdFusion currently has with truly entering the enterprise could potentially be solved.

NOTE: Now I have to ground myself after that rant. It looks like Macromedia was a big sponsor of JSR 223, so it’s probable I’m just over estimating what’s possible with Java 6.

There was a bunch of other stuff in the podcast about byte-code optimization and language comparisons that make it worth a listen. This was by far one of the best Java Posse episodes I’ve listened to since I’ve started.