JRuby is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter. Like most languages discussed in this series, JRuby is both powerful and easy to learn. It incorporates the sophisticated text-processing of Perl, the iterators and closures familiar to Groovy developers, and the rapid development features of Jython and other languages discussed in this series. JRuby is also an interpreted language, so it can be run from the command line or used to evaluate simple expressions or blocks of code on the fly.