Engine Yard is Teaming with Red Hat on JRuby

With the fourth annual JRubyConf taking place this week, we’re announcing that Engine Yard is teaming with Red Hat to continue our three years of development work on JRuby.

JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, is a popular open source package that enables Ruby applications to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby allows developers to take advantage of the efficiency of Ruby while leveraging their existing investment in Java libraries and code. It provides an important bridge for enterprises who want to maintain their existing apps while taking advantage of the faster development speed that Ruby offers when building new Web apps.

During the last three years, the JRuby core team has worked at Engine Yard to develop and enhance JRuby, as well as cloud application development and Ruby hosting. Engine Yard has sponsored the team as well as JRubyConf during that time. We have also built the first and only commercially-supported JRuby cloud offering with JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud, our Platform as a Service.

The JRuby core team (Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo) is moving to Red Hat to continue working on JRuby, JVM languages and OpenJDK support for them. We will continue to offer JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud (you can see our cloud pricing) and our commercial support plans and professional services engagements. We’ll work closely with Charles and Tom as well as Red Hat to continue development of JRuby and collaborate on JRuby features to support customers running on JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud.

This is a great opportunity to add more resources for JRuby and continue the important work that has been accomplished, including the recent JRuby 1.7.0.preview 1 release. We look forward to working with Red Hat and continuing to collaborate with Charles and Tom on advancing JRuby.