- Overall results First off, I'd like to thank everyone who voted on this poll. With a total of 236 votes, here is the summary of the first two questions: - Are you currently working with or researching about language alternatives for the JVM? - e.g. JRuby, Scala, Groovy {% img /assets/images/scala_improvements.png %} Tooling. The majority of comment urge for better tooling and IDE support. That simple. - Others

Do you know? I didn't. And started to get annoyed by using these terms interchangeably and not really knowing the difference. There are a few. And they are subtle. I don't think most of us would ever have problems with it but it's the kind of information you'll be glad to know when having those weird behaviors in your code on a Friday at 6:01 pm, just before pushing to production.

The motivation for this post came from a couple of messages I've seen on the jruby's google group and because I think it's pretty cool to share how we tackled this problem. - A little bit of context We, as a vast amount of people out there, have legacy Java code. A lot. In our case this legacy is pretty much crucial to our business. We can't just trash it and start from scratch.

I've just watched a video from Google IO where Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons went through some of the aspects that involves the development of an application for the cloud - focusing on the JVM. In terms of the Google App Engine, you don't have access to a relational database, thing I found out when I first tried it. Instead you get a Big Table. Martin put out a good analogy and you can just think of it as a nested hash map.

Wanna help improve JRuby? Make sure you read this post by Charles Nutter first. There he explains how to run Ruby specs with JRuby. Start with fixing Ruby specs is a great way to get acquainted with the code. And it’s also a important task in order to make sure JRuby is the most complete and compatible ruby implementation out there. But before you get your hands dirty, it will be a lot easier if you can actually debug JRuby’s source while fixing any specs - or bugs/features for that matter.

This is basically a compilation of a few tools/habits that I use to keep focused and at a high level of productivity when working alone. Works great for me and I hope there are useful tips for you as well. Music This is one of my favorites. When working alone I hate having noisy people around, which happens quite often if you work in an open office space like me.

Yesterday I organized our first CodingDojo here at the company and I'm glad to say it was a great success! The problem chosen was the Karate Chop, from Dave Thomas' Code Kata. As it was also my first time organizing a Dojo, we took some time to get things straight, explain everyone the rules and start coding. Nothing that would compromise the experience, though. The rules were basically the ones of a RandoriKata and as a mechanism for switching pairs we chose the TimeBox with a limit of 5 minutes.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

As you probably know, since rails 2.1 you can write test methods in the following format: test "hotel should return its permalink" do #your test code here end Which is great, as the test name becomes much more clear. But you can't simply run this test easily from the command line. You'd have to run something like: $ ruby your_test_file.rb -n test_hotel_should_return_its_permalink It annoys me. And it's not practical either to make the test fail just so you can get the test's real name.

The rcov_plugin project is a rails plugin for rcov that adds some useful rake tasks to your application. And since I'm currently working in a JRuby project it made sense to use this plugin. The thing is, among other stuff, an rcov report from a JRuby project includes some files that shouldn't be there at all, plus you also need to change the way you call rcov as such. Thus, I thought I'd contribute these changes to the plugin and my pull request was approved this morning - just install the latest version and you should be good to go.