Engine Yard Adds JRuby Support

Today at JavaOne, Engine Yard is announcing support for JRuby. This means that people will soon be able to select JRuby as a runtime option for Engine Yard Cloud, and subsequently on the Engine Yard private cloud for cluster and slice customers. We’re excited to partner with Charlie Nutter and Tom Enebo and the broader JRuby team to make this happen. JRuby support will be in beta for Engine Yard Cloud in early July.

Since we’re announcing this at JavaOne, it might be good to reiterate the main reasons why Java developers have migrated and are continuing to migrate to Ruby and Rails:

1. Rails: easier to learn, and faster to code than Java frameworks, and with Rails 3 coming—even simpler to extend.
2. Ruby: easier to write with lots of means of abstraction (blocks, modules and metaprogramming.)
3. Ruby: faster for iterative and agile methods with dynamic typing and no compile cycles
4. An active community with excellent tools, training and lots of innovation: Agile Development With Rails, TextMate, Peepcode, RubyForge, RSpec, DataMapper, Rack etc.

Not to mention excellent REST support, a very fast regex engine, great collections handling, and all the other hundred reasons why people simply ENJOY developing in Ruby.

Very practically, we’re also adding JRuby support in response to demand from both companies and from professional web developers, who want to use Ruby and Rails, but have existing libraries written in Java. For various reasons, they sometimes prefer Java native integration over the more ideal method of exposing old code via web-services. These folks like JRuby because it gives them an easy way to transition from Java to Ruby without having to re-write all their existing libraries on day one with Ruby (or completely swap out their platform and tools). In our mind, when you’re getting people to adopt a language and framework like Ruby and Rails—the more you can do to keep backward compatibility with existing stuff (code, tools, platforms) the better.

With JRuby support, our ongoing maintenance of the 1.8.6 branch of MRI and our continued sponsorship of Rubinius, we hope that Engine Yard is continuing to help Ruby and Rails be the first choices of web developers everywhere.