Welcoming JRuby to Engine Yard!

Although it’s been widely reported, blogged and tweeted already, I wanted to let our blog readers know the terrific news that the Sun JRuby team will be joining Engine Yard full-time next week! We’re really thrilled to have the JRuby team on-board and look forward to further great things from Charlie, Tom and Nick.

Why JRuby for Engine Yard?

JRuby is a project with accelerating momentum. The JRuby team has done an excellent job over the last many years developing a stable, high performance Ruby implementation that is showing increasing popularity among java developers looking for more productive frameworks. It was clear from talking to developers (particularly enterprise developers) that JRuby – with the appropriate support and backing – was a really compelling choice for Ruby adoption.

What’s next?

We’ve worked out a compelling plan with the JRuby team. We plan to introduce commercial product support for JRuby, as well as invest in JRuby documentation. In this way, we aim to greatly accelerate adoption of Ruby (and Rails) in java-based development shops.

Wait, don’t you already have a Ruby team? What about Rubinius?

We believe that Rubinius is the future Ruby implementation that will be the highest performance option on the market, and the compelling production option – even as MRI remains the language reference. We’re committed to continuing investment in Rubinius progress. But JRuby offers a unique and easy adoption path today to people and organizations that have committed to the java platform as their “home” – and the two projects have a continued viable parallel existence, tied together by RubySpec as the community-accepted test-suite for Rubyness.

We’re excited about what the future holds for Ruby and Rails, and this development is just another item on the long list of factors that will contribute to our collective success. Thanks to everyone for all the support, and a warm welcome to the JRuby team!

JD