Preparing for 0.9.0

Yes, I had intended to post at least once a week. Things have been moving along pretty fast with JRuby since JavaOne. Here's a quick update...I'll post a more detailed one soon.

• RubyGems now installs perfectly, and works correctly. This is due in large part to Ola Bini's work on RbYAML and JvYAML, Ruby and Java YAML parsers which we are integrating into JRuby.
• Gems install correctly from local files or from the network. They're a little slow, due to some bottlenecks we're ironing out, but they work. Ola's post shows it in action.
• The "rails" script for generating a base application works. This is the first step in Rails development, and it ended up just kinda working without any additional effort.
• Tom and I have been working on performance, putting in 5-10% speedup fixes here and there. There's a lot more to do, but we're making great progress.
• We have gotten approval from matz to include the full complement of Ruby's .rb libraries in the next release of JRuby. This means all you will need for a working JRuby install is the release archive. We will also likely pre-install rubygems, so we're on par with a typical Ruby install in that regard.
• Due to networking and IO fixes from Evan Buswell (especially his work to make 'select' function) we are very close to running Webrick in JRuby. Along with this would come the "server" script in Rails, which allows you a simple development deployment for Rails development and testing.
• We will be making the ActiveRecord JDBC connector available to the public concurrent with this release. It is unknown yet whether it will be a gem, a Rails plugin, or whether we can get the Rails guys to include it in the main release.
• A number of people are interested in beginning work to make Rake work well in JRuby for doing Java builds. I am one of those people, and time permitting I will start trying to make this happen.
• I am also interested in implementing the win32ole library in JRuby. There are various plugins for Java that allow calling OLE components, and it should not be difficult to wrap one of those libraries. This would allow things like WATIR to work seamlessly in JRuby.

And here's a little funny that Tom just pointed out: Ed Burnette's JRuby Photo

Tom is on the left, looking into the future, and I'm on the right, staring down the camera.