JRubyConf State of the Union

Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo

In just over three years, JRuby has gone from obscurity to being one of the best Ruby implementations available. But we're not slowing down! We've got the entire Java world to conquer, and we need your help. In our "State of the Union" we'll explore where JRuby's been, where we are today, and where we think we need to go in the future. We'll look at the competition, perform a candid assessment of JRuby's strengths and weaknesses, and share with you our concrete plans for upcoming versions of JRuby. Then we'll start down the path forward with a day of presentations, discussions, and hacking.

JRuby on Rails

Nick Sieger

Since the advent of thread-safe Rails in the 2.2 release, JRuby has seen increased adoption as a stable, dependable, performant deployment platform for Rails applications. I'll cover the state of the Rails stack on JRuby to date, including tweaks and improvements still needed. I'll also provide a sneak peek at how JRuby will be poised to take unique advantage of the modularity, features and performance characteristics in the upcoming 3.0 release.

Business on JRuby

Michael Mullany, Joe O'Brien, Justin Gehtland, Chad Wathington and Michael Bryzek

The JRuby project has been growing steadily and impressively since it was first released, but in the last year, we've seen major adoption by businesses small and enterprise alike. The Business on JRuby panel will feature four top Ruby company executives who are using JRuby in live production apps today. They'll discuss why they chose JRuby, the challenges they faced along the way, and where they see JRuby going in the future.

Ruby Icing on the Java Cake

Anthony Eden

Recently at chi.mp we converted the back-end feed processing engine that consumes tens-of-thousands of data feeds from Python to JRuby. With native threading we were able to greatly reduce the number of machines required to run the processing engine while increasing the throughput. But all is not unicorns and rainbows. In the process we discovered issues both with Ruby libraries that were not thread-safe as well as limitations due to blocking IO. With JRuby we are able to solve both of these issues and have fun doing it. In this talk I will go through some of the details of what we've learned and how we've used the awesome Java integration layer in JRuby to wrap thread-safe Java libraries and take advantage of Java's non-blocking IO capabilities through the Apache HTTPCore NIO library.

The JRuby Testing Story

Ola Bini

Testing is the most important activity in the development process. If you don't test, how do you know that your code actually works correctly? And if you don't have tests, how do you know you don't break something?

JRuby makes it possible to test Ruby code - but also to apply Ruby testing frameworks to Java code. This session will take a look at the current state of the start in JRuby testing, looking at how well the different frameworks work, and what you need to do to take your Java testing to the next century.

JRuby on Google App Engine

John Woodell

Popular Ruby web frameworks can now be deployed to Google App Engine. Developers can benefit from all the meta-programming power of Ruby, the portability of Java, and then deploy to Google App Engine for unprecedented scalability. Java developers can quickly put together a simple Sinatra front-end for legacy J2EE code, while Rubyists can easily integrate servlets to do some heavy lifting. The JRuby development environment for Google App Engine runs inside a servlet container, and we have tools that make this easy. We'll walk you through publishing a JRuby app, and show some demos that take advantage of the latest APIs available from the Google App Engine SDK for Java.

Lightning Talks

Working on something interesting? Building a JRuby library or developer tool? Now's your chance to shine! Sign up onsite for a lightning talk slot and get your 15 (more like five) minutes of fame!

Monkeybars: MVC GUI Apps in JRuby

Logan Barnett

Monkeybars streamlines the act of making non-trivial sized GUI applications without writing a line of Java. Monkeybars utilizes Java's built-in Swing library and exposes Swing in a nice manner using MVC. Monkeybars apps run on machines without Ruby, JRuby, or gems of any kind installed. The talk will show how to make a small cross-platform GUI application and field questions from the crowd