July 27th, 2007
FOSCON slides
I have been asked for the slides of my FOSCON presentation. They can be downloaded in PDF format from here: http://ologix.com/JRubyWhirlwindTour.pdf.
July 25th, 2007
Really Radical Ruby
I had a very good time at FOSCON III with the Portland Ruby Brigade yesterday. There were lots of entertaining talks too. I would say that my “lightning talk” wasn’t really a lightning talk at all. Unless you count the speed of my talking… I managed to race through all my 22 slides – all of them shock full with information – in the time alloted to me. Hopefully people learned something from it.
Chad Wathington demonstrated Mingle which also was very nice.
John Lam showed us a taste of IronRuby, and also talked some about the implementation particulars that made certain things faster in IronRuby than on MRI. Interesting stuff, but I’m looking forward to the full talk tomorrow.
Alan McKean from GemStone showcased GemStone/JRuby – still a work in progress though. For those of you who don’t know what GemStone is, think extremely powerful object persistence. And they’re building a new version for Ruby, on top of JRuby. Very cool.
I realized that there are a few points about JRuby that haven’t been emphasized enough, though, so here is there executive summary bullet points:
- JRuby is totally Java compliant and runs on any Java.
- JRuby is 1.0
- JRuby supports Rails
- ThoughtWorks offers commercial support for JRuby
- JRuby performance is on par with the C implementation, on average.
July 24th, 2007
OSCON: first tutorial day
Yesterday was the first tutorial day at OSCON. Due to some planning mistakes, I didn’t get the correct conference pass, so I missed the first tutorial. After that was sorted out I proceeded to the second tutorial of the day: Advanced Techniques for Parsing, by Mark Dominus. Of course I knew that the code would be Perl, but that didn’t disturb me so much, since I expected to see some advanced parsing techniques. This is where disappointment hit me. Maybe it was advanced Perl code used, but it was not in any way advanced parsing. The first 2 hours were spent implementing a recursive descent parser with 7 productions. After that, I decided that I wouldn’t be learning anything from this presentation, and headed back to the hotel, which was good, since I got sick that afternoon and spent the rest of the evening slightly delirious in my bed.
But now I’m up and going again, sitting here waiting for the tutorial “Real World Grails” to begin. I’m looking forward to see how Grails is actually used, since the presentations I’ve seen on it usually just show scaffolding and simpler things.
I have also decided on the subject for tonights FOSCON, but the slides are not finished yet. And the topic I choose is kind of a cop out: JRuby Cavalcade is the title of the talk, and I will basically just run through loads of interesting and funny JRuby things until I run out of time or gets booed of stage. Hope to see you there!
July 21st, 2007
JRuby at FOSCON 2007
So, I will attend and present at FOSCON 2007, which is arranged by the Portland Ruby Brigade (PDX.rb), and the theme is Really Radical Ruby. It’s on Tuesday, more information here. It seems to be an interesting event, so please show up!
I have not yet decided what I’m going to talk about. JRuby will be involved in some way of course. Anyone have any request about what I should talk about?
