New Innovations in JRuby 1.7.0

I am extremely humbled and honored to receive the inaugural Engine Yard Innovator Award.

Four years ago, I was lured by Ruby on Rails to pick up a new programming language (I wrote code mostly in Perl back then) and I have not looked back. Rails was (and still is) fun to write applications with, but deployment was not very pleasant (unsurprisingly, the PaaS market has blossomed since then!). This drove me to JRuby, for which warbler eased the pain enormously.

I was lucky to have found JRuby, whose core members are welcoming, and for which I have been able to make meaningful contributions. The JRuby team released 1.7.0 in October. This release includes support for the new ‘invokedynamic’ feature support, better 1.9 compatibility, and continues our tradition of performance improvements. As we speak, we are preparing for the 1.7.1 release with bug fixes as well. JRuby continues to expand its reach. The “JRuby Guy” Charles Oliver Nutter and I will be giving the first JRuby workshop in the Southern hemisphere at the inaugural RubyConf AU in February. If you are in the neighborhood, do attend and say hi.

Thank you, Engine Yard, for this award, and for continued support and recognition for the importance of JRuby.