Almost a year ago, Antonio Cangiano performed some benchmarks on the then present Ruby implementations: Ruby 1.8.5, YARV (now Ruby 1.9), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal. The results were that YARV, although nowhere near ready for production use, was streets ahead of Ruby 1.8, and the other implementations raised enough errors to still be considered ‘experimental’.

Now Antonio has rerun the tests on Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9 (from trunk), JRuby (from trunk), Rubinius (from trunk) and XRuby 0.3.2. Ruby 1.9 again takes the lead by quite a margin, but the best development is that instead of being a distant third (behind Ruby 1.8), JRuby has made significant improvements and is smack bang in between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 in terms of performance (while offering, of course, the benefits of the Java ecosystem). Read More

The following article is a guest article written by John Philip Green of Savvica, a Toronto based educational technology company whose development efforts are focused on Ruby and Rails.

Hiring Rails full-time Rails developers is hard. Here’s why:

• Surging demand. You will likely fight other companies for every recruit.
• $100/hour++ freelance consulting rates are commonplace.
• It’s hard to evaluate candidates. In the Java or .NET world, number of years of experience is relevant, but not here. The framework is only 3 years old.

I’ve hired ten full-time Rails developers into startups so far in 2007, but to do that I’ve had to interview hundreds and learned a lot of lessons. Read More

Ruby 1.9 is almost upon us! With an expected release date around this Christmas, it won’t be long until you can start to play with Ruby 1.9 and enjoy some of the much-hailed performance increases (not to mention features).

“But I want it now!” you say. Well, as an open source project with an active ruby-core community working on a public code repository, it’s totally possible to get yourself a copy of Ruby 1.9 and begin playing with it today. You can’t expect to run production code on it and you shouldn’t expect any code to be rock solid, but with the release date such a short time away, you might find it feels “close enough” now for you to really get knee-deep in the new features, and you know how great it’ll be to pull out some great new techniques later on when the rest of your co-workers are still upgrading.. Read More

Tim Bray presents “Ruby Survey Results,” the results of a survey of 1000 Ruby developers on their favorite development tools, primarily focusing on editors / IDEs. In the category of Rails-focused developers, 38% of the vote went to TextMate, with vi, NetBeans and Eclipse lagging far behind. With Ruby-focused developers, however, vi edged out TextMate by a single vote, with TextMate, Emacs and Netbeans as runners up. With all results tallied together, however, TextMate took a healthy lead on vi, and cements its position as the #1 preferred development tool of Ruby developers overall. Read More