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by Agnieszka Figiel.
Original Post: Academic Science Festival 2007 in Krak��w
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In this post about a RoR speech that was delivered last year I already referred to the Academic Science Festival in Krak��w, whose 3rd edition has just finished. It was a great event, clearly it keeps getting better and better and becomes an important event. Unfortunately, even though I planned to attend more lectures I only managed to get there for the last two ones.
JRuby- Ruby on the JVM
Ola Bini gave a speech on a trendy topic – JRuby. I’m not a huge fan of the JRuby project, but listening to its core developer was a pleasure. Ola started off by introducing the main features of ruby. He did not elaborate too much on the implementation of jruby, but made a short demonstration of calling java from irb, like creating a swing window, which was pretty impressive. He also demonstrated jruby on rails, by creating and running a simple scaffold application.
The reason why I’m not all enthusiastic about JRuby, which indeed solves an abundance of problems that ruby has, is the fact that by design it won’t allow interfacing with native C libraries. Now that’s cruel :) If there are a lot of Java libraries without equivalents in ruby, there obviously must also be a considerable amount of C libraries with no equivalents in Java, or slower equivalents. Consequently, I’m rather looking forward to Ruby 2.0 on YARV than JRuby, especially that there show up very optimistic benchmark reports like this ruby implementations shootout.
Lucas Renggli spoke about Seaside, a web framework for Smalltalk. I was planning to look into this tool for some time, so the speech was pretty interesting to me. What I didn’t like in Seaside was the way of outputting html – there are no templates and html generation is done pretty much like with the builder gem, except it is not extracted to separate view files like in Rails. I also didnt’t like the terrible urls that the framework generates, but Lucas said they can be mapped to something more user friendly.
What I definitely liked was a presentation of the comet mechanism in Seaside – Lucas opened a simple counter application in several browser windows (various browser flavours) and demonstrated how by incrementing the counter in one window the new value is pushed from the server to all the other windows. I used to be pretty sure it was impossible ;) Now I see there’s a similar mechanism for Rails (it allows for similar functionality, but is implemented differently) – it’s called juggernaut.
One reflection after these two excellent speeches is that these guys must be superhuman, since their work on the JRuby and Seaside projects is mostly a free time activity, besides their regular activities. Respect!
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