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JRuby Inside

Links and posts about JRuby

Ruby Implementation Shootout: A Bright Future for Ruby Performance!December 9 2008

Back in December 2007, Antonio Cangiano presented The Great Ruby Shootout, a large set of benchmarks of then-current Ruby implementations (Ruby 1.8.5, YARV - early Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius, XRuby, and Cardinal). Even then, despite Ruby 1.9's infancy and experimental nature, Ruby 1.9 came out as about three times faster than Ruby 1.8.5 - while other implementations were barely faster than 1.8.5.

Now.. for 2008: Ruby 1.9.1 is the winner..!

Now Antonio has put together an all new December 2008 Great Ruby Shootout! There's a lot of reading to do but the results are very exciting. JRuby's performance has come along in leaps and bounds and Ruby 1.9.1 is around five times faster than Ruby 1.8.7. Phusion's Ruby Enterprise Edition (basically an amended fork of 1.8.6) also comes in at a surprising two-times faster than 1.8.7! Remember that Antonio's benchmarks are by no means representative of how your application might be using Ruby, but these numbers are extremely encouraging.

As well as comparin

What’s Hot on Github - November 2008November 30 2008

What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting interesting projects that are new or updated this month, within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.

This month's picks:

• http://github.com/karmi/marley/ - Marley is minimal blog engine without admin interface written in Sinatra framework
• http://github.com/evilchelu/braid/ - Simple tool to help track Git and SVN vendor branches in a Git repository (had some nice updates recently)
• http://github.com/purzelrakete/blackbook/ - Blackbook automates the nitty-gritty of importing contacts from various services and files and exporting them as VCard, XML, or simple Hash.
• http://github.com/rsl/acts_as_snook/ - ActsAsSnook is a simple and elegant method of handling comment spam that doesn’t rely on CAPTCHAS or Javascript or external we

Rails 2.2 Released - 27 Links and Resources To Get You GoingNovember 22 2008

Ruby's most popular Web application framework, Ruby on Rails, takes another giant step today with the release of Rails 2.2! It follows on just five months after Rails 2.1, but offers even more significant improvements, particularly in the areas of compatibility, internationalization, and documentation. Read David Heinemeier Hansson's release post for a quick overview.

Ruby Inside's sister site, Rails Inside, was launched alongside Rails 2.1 in June, and would, you'd think, be the ideal place for a post like this, but no. Rails is very significant to the Ruby world as a whole, so you'll still get the biggest of the biggest Rails announcements here on Ruby Inside! If you want more regular Rails-only news, however, go and subscribe to Rails Inside (RSS feed or

HappyMapper: Easy XML / Object Mapping for RubyistsNovember 20 2008

HappyMapper is John Nunemaker's attempt at "making XML fun again" for Rubyists by providing an object to XML mapping library with a succinct syntax. Essentially, you can use HappyMapper to rapidly turn XML into Ruby objects - even nesting them inside and referring to each other. This is powerful stuff. To install, just gem install happymapper

John's own examples are powerful demonstrations of how it works, so check them out. The first is parsing the XML returned from Twitter. The statues and associated users in that XML can be processed (with the relationship maintained) with the following code:

class User include HappyMapper element :id, Integer element :name, String element :screen_name, String element :location, String element :descript

Cucumber: The Latest in Ruby TestingNovember 19 2008

Testing is a firmly ingrained part of the Ruby culture: you probably ran across Test::Unit not long after you first started writing Ruby code (though it wouldn't be surprising if you ignored it for a while). But it hasn't been a static part of Ruby - we've seen the simple availability of tests evolve into test-driven development (TDD) that in turn gave rise to behavior-driven development (BDD). Along the way, Ruby has spawned a variety of testing tools and frameworks. The latest, Aslak Hellesoy's Cucumber, is the latest addition to the RSpec family of tools.

Cucumber is designed to allow you to execute feature documentation written in plain text (often known as "stories"). I've been experimenting with it as a replacement for integration tests in Rails. With Cucumber, you can write tests that look like this:

Scenario: See all vendors Given I am logged in as a user in the administrator role And There are 3 vendors When I go to the manage vendors page Then I should see the first 3 vendor names

With Cucumber, that it an executable specification that you can discuss with the customer and then use to