JRuby architects leave Sun

By Alex Handy

August 29, 2009 —

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo are bilingual. They've spent the past two years at Sun Microsystems working on JRuby, which allows developers to write Ruby code and run it on top of a JVM. But after Oracle began its takeover of Sun, Nutter and Enebo say they found the environment there increasingly frustrating.

So, this August, the pair left Sun and joined Engine Yard, a Ruby-focused hosting and development startup in San Francisco's hip South Park neighborhood. It was there that we caught up with the JRuby pair and asked them about the project, their new jobs and the future of Java.

SD TIMES: When last we spoke, Java developers were screaming for a simple scripting layer on top of Java. You two had, essentially, given the community as much by releasing JRuby. But since that time, almost every language has a bridge to the JVM. Is this trend going to continue?

NUTTER: It's definitely continuing and accelerating. I think what we managed to prove with JRuby is that the JVM is and always has been an excellent platform for multiple languages. Languages like Scala and Clojure are designed for the JVM. The interesting challenge for us and Jython and Rhino are bringing languages from off platforms with their own ecosystems and making them also work on JVM.

ENEBO: Those external projects have their own expectations they bring with them from their environments. Those languages were originally written in C, and some of those features don't exist in the JVM.

SD TIMES: So, you collaborate with the Jython project?

NUTTER: We work with those guys. We have similar challenges.

ENEBO: We share some code between the projects now as well. The JVM doesn't give you access to POSIX libraries. So we have a POSIX library we share between the two projects that uses JNA to call out some of the C methods that the JVM doesn't give you access to.

SD TIMES: With all these languages on top of Java, do you think Java (as a programming language, not as an environment) is becoming less relevant?

NUTTER: I think Java is becoming the C of the JVM. It's what all these languages are implemented in at some level. It’s the lingua franca.

SD TIMES: The ability to access Java libraries from Ruby code seems to be a killer feature for JRuby. Is this why most people are using it?

NUTTER: The Java platform is extremely mature, and for just about any feature or framework you're looking for, there is at least one library, probably two or three, with multiple iterations. The Java platform has a lot of bad libraries on it, but it also has a lot of libraries that learn from those mistakes.

ENEBO: There's something like 7,000 different XML libraries in Java of various levels of quality, but that's a completely solved thing in the Java space.

NUTTER: In the Ruby space, up until the last year or two, the XML libraries were not as good.

SD TIMES: What sort of benefits are you seeing from mixing language communities?

NUTTER: One of the big draws for JRuby and for Jython is the fact that there is this entire external community that has never been bound by the limitations of the Java platform. They've come up with new ways of solving those problems.

By the same token, people are recognizing that different languages solve different problems in different ways. The majority of JRuby applications are there for the Web, but oddly enough, a lot of people are interested in desktop application work, too.

ENEBO: There are, like, 11 different GUI libraries written in Ruby to wrap Swing or SWT.

SD TIMES: So now JRuby is going to solve the Java GUI problem?

NUTTER: It's a pain point on the Ruby side because there's not a single framework they can use, and it's a pain point on the Java side because Swing is just massive. So people have created Ruby wrappers for Swing.

ENEBO: Java's such a portable runtime that Swing just runs on every OS, and it addresses a problem Ruby doesn't address very well.

SD TIMES: So why did you both decide to leave Sun?

NUTTER: It was largely the uncertainty of staying at Sun that was difficult for us. JRuby is a fast-moving project, so not being able to talk about the future, not being able to talk about the progress [was tough]. We felt, with Engine Yard very interested in pushing JRuby forward, it was time to make a move. It was a tough choice But it's almost as if Sun left us.

SD TIMES: So what would you like to see changed in Java?

NUTTER: There are a number of JVM level features I'd like to see. JSR 292. We're especially interested in tail-call support, which I think may have a JSR soon. I would like to see a layer for programmatic access to C libraries. There's JNA, but I want something similar to that which allows you to pull in C libraries when you have to. There's a lot of people working on it as external projects.

ENEBO: Interface injection, which I think is a Part of JSR 292. There's enough mass behind these external projects, so it will be added to the JVM. But JVMs don't come out every year, so it will probably take a while.

Related Search Term(s): Engine Yard, Java, Ruby

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33718

Engine Yard gives clouds a backbone Vertebra, an open-source project attempting to coordinate multiple cloud systems and applications from anywhere in the world, is the work of Engine Yard, a Ruby-focused hosting and development company. Vertebra uses DNS and XMPP to accomplish this.

Google App Engine now pours Java Google's hosted application service loosens constraints by adding preliminary support for Java. Teams are already working on expanding that support to JRuby and Groovy.

Integration Watch: A sudden bumper crop of IDEs IDEs have continued to see growth, and several new releases are there for many different programming languages. Eclipse and open-source communities have primarily been the drivers of these projects.

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