It’s really exciting to see megacorps taking a vocal interest in dynamic languages. It’s even better to see them put their money where their mouth is.
I recently mentioned Microsoft’s release of Iron Python 1.0. Now, there’s even more exciting news in the dynaming languages world.
First, for those of you who’ve never met her, I’d like to introduce you to JRuby. JRuby is a “100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.” The mere existence of this open source project is a boon to the dynamic languages world, as it encourages the adoption of ruby. Particularly, it provides a more direct interface through which ruby can be used as an enterprise integration language for the java platform. If you’re stuck maintaining a steaming, complicated mess (e.g. a J2EE Portal), JRuby can melt off some of the fat. At the very least, you can use JRuby to write your unit tests and to script your builds.
But the real news is that “The JRuby Guys” are joining Sun as paid, fulltime employees! Sun is paying them to continue making JRuby a solid, open source environment for building and deploying ruby applications with full access to the vast multitude of java libraries. On top of that, they’ll be working on JRuby tool support and on helping to transform the Java platform into an even better platform on which to run dynamic languages.
Tim Bray announced the ‘aquisition’ in this post. As a javascript fanatic, I also took a keen interest in his mention of Phobos, about which I’ll post shortly.
UPDATE: Ted Leung blogged about these two events as well.
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