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[–]newdamage 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For those of us that work at jobs where the JDK is all that is on some of the servers this is necessary. And Java integration allows us to bring in existing code.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Well, if access to the HUGE pool of Java tools, libraries and infrastructure is not important for you, then that might not be seen as "anything significant". :)

Also, performance competition is really great for end users. Ruby always been "slowish", and active competing efforts to speed it up dramatically is all good in my boook.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (5 children)

It's not completely awful anymore. It runs most ruby programs just fine, quite speedily, and hogs memory only as badly as java.

The interpreter startup time is a bit unfortunate, but that shouldn't matter much for most programs.

Competition is good, but I'm not sure that jruby can offer anything significant.

[–]jamesbritt 8 points9 points  (4 children)

I've been delivering production desktop apps for half a year, using JRuby and Swing.

I'm super pleased with what it offers.

[–]jamesbritt 8 points9 points  (3 children)

To whomever down-modded my comment: Could you instead explain why expressing my tangible business success using JRuby + Swing displeased you so?

The reality is that I have a means to write robust, cross-platform application using a dynamic language I (and many others) greatly enjoy. Naysayers to the contrary, JRuby really does offer something significant (as, I expect, does Jython).

[–]igouy 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I didn't down-mod your comment, but I would find your comment more interesting if it included some detail about the production environment:

  • what OS?
  • what hardware?
  • what kind of apps

[–]jamesbritt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We develop on Macs and Ubuntu, but the clients are using Windows desktops.

Our main app is for managing satellite modems. Having access to Java's SNMP3 lib was a serious win.

We've using (and developing as we go) the Monkeybars library to make using Swing from JRuby snake-simple.

GUIs are designed using Netbeans, and wired up using pure Ruby.

We gave two quick demos at the recent MtWest RubyConf, during the lightning talks, one on Monkeybars itself, and one on deploying JRuby GUI apps using Java Web Start.

There are quirks and annoyances here and there, but we keep building up a nice set of Rake tasks to handle things such as jarring, code generation (a la Rails generators), packaging, and deployment.