Nick Sieger

Three Years of JRuby on Rails

Posted by Nick Sieger Wed, 13 May 2009 21:21:37 GMT

Just yesterday the 3-year mark of JRuby running Rails passed by. In the intervening period since JRuby first started to run Rails, we’ve seen:

• 6715 commits to JRuby and counting (via git-rev-list --pretty=oneline 2fc4a18..HEAD | wc -l)
• Over 40,000 messages to the JRuby mailing lists
• 3645 issues opened, 3019 of those already closed
• 18 JRuby releases (0.9.0 to 1.2), with 1.3 coming soon
• The birth of activerecord-jdbc, jruby-rack, jetty-rails, glassfish gem and many other projects to make running Rails on JRuby as seamless as possible
• Kenai.com, Oracle Mix, and a growing list of production sites running JRuby
• FFI support allowing JRuby to interact with native code
• JRuby and Rails running on Google App Engine

And yet, JRuby still has plenty of untapped potential and room for growth and adoption: in the existing Ruby and Rails communities where JRuby is showing promise as a stable, performant, concurrency-enabled, and leak-proof platform; and as a transformative force to capture the mindshare of a huge army of Java developers who aren’t even aware that there’s a language and runtime that allows them to preserve their skills and existing code while developing new applications faster and with much greater enjoyment.

Here’s looking to the future of continued growth for JRuby over the next three years. The best is yet to come!