JRuby Core Team Members Enebo and Nutter Moving to Red Hat
Breaking news! At JRubyConf 2012 (a 3 day JRuby-focused conference in Minneapolis) it has just been announced that JRuby core team members Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter are moving from Engine Yard to open source giants Red Hat.
The news was confirmed by Nutter in a tweet:
Engine Yard shares their side of the story and says they'll continue to "work closely with Charles and Tom as well as Red Hat to continue development of JRuby and collaborate on JRuby features to support customers running on JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud."
From the Red Hat perspective comes this post by JBoss director Mark Little. He notes:
They'll [Enebo and Nutter] be working with various teams in JBoss and Red Hat, including the obvious candidates such as TorqueBox, Immutant and OpenJDK, but also helping us deliver on our polyglot visition. I can say that bringing them to Red Hat has been almost 2 years in the making, but it's time that has been well worth spent and I have great expectations for their future here.
Mark Little
JRuby has had an interesting history, starting out as purely as a Java port of MRI by Jan Arne Petersen. It has matured significantly over the years, especially after the current core team leaders took over the reins in 2004. JRuby's performance now trumps that of MRI 1.9 in many cases and JRuby is broadly considered as Ruby's second-most established Ruby implementation (although Rubinius is approaching quickly from the rear in this regard.)
Red Hat has recently begun to make moves into the dynamic app hosting world with OpenShift, a Heroku-style auto-scaling 'Platform as a Service' (PaaS) for webapps. It includes Ruby support and along with the JRuby news shows a growing interest in the language at the popular open source company.
The JRuby team also announced the release of JRuby 1.7 preview 1 this week.
May 22, 2012 at 6:12 pm
Plus, you know, Torquebox.
May 22, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Just thought I'd point out a post from Engine Yard about it http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/engine-yard-is-teaming-with-red-hat-on-jruby-2/
May 22, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Evan: I just came back to add that and saw your comment - thanks, I've added it in now :-)
May 22, 2012 at 6:44 pm
These guys are awesome. Most language ports do not end up going that well or eventually fall behind the main language because it is so much work. JRuby, on the other hand, is as good (or better) than MRI, and the gains in Java 7 could be absolutely huge for the ruby community. The benchmarks are insane. Dynamic languages being an order of magnitude slower could be a thing of the past.
May 22, 2012 at 7:48 pm
@headius and @tom_enebo working on Immutant? Wonderful!
May 24, 2012 at 12:52 pm
"Engine Yard is Teaming with Red Hat on JRuby"
When your staff leave to go work for another company, I'm not sure that counts as you teaming with them ;)
June 5, 2012 at 1:13 am
Hey Peter, I'd like to ask you about the Machine Learning topic. Is there some of introducing material?
I am asking because I found that there is enough materials on Python, but may want to find something fresh for Ruby.
Thanks!
Pingback: The Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for May 2012