Engine Yard Offers Professional JRuby Developer Support

Engine Yard, a provider of a cloud computing platform for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications, has announced a new professional support offering for JRuby developers.

With the core JRuby team now residing at Engine Yard, the company is now providing an industry first in delivering professional services for JRuby developers. JRuby is an implementation of Ruby that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

In an interview with eWEEK, Thomas Enebo, co-lead of the open-source JRuby project, said, “Every time we go to events we get lots of people who ask about support for JRuby. People would run into problems and have no central place to go to look for resolution. We decided to do something about that, and also to provide advice on tuning your JRuby or Rails apps.”

JRuby allows Java developers to use Ruby to efficiently expand the capabilities of Java applications, or create entirely new applications that leverage an existing investment in Java. By utilizing professional support for JRuby, customers can take advantage of Engine Yard’s world-class Ruby, Rails and JRuby experts to accelerate success of their projects. Enebo, JRuby co-lead Charles Nutter and JRuby developer Nick Sieger, among others, joined Engine Yard from then Sun Microsystems last August.

“It’s been great for the project.” Enebo said of the team’s move to Engine Yard. “We really like the move we made. Engine Yard is much closer to where we need to be as a project.” At Sun there was more than a little uncertainty on where things might go, he noted.

“JRuby provided the critical features we needed to build our information store, including scalability, performance, and multi-threading,” said Ben Summers, technical director of OneIS, in a statement. “We wanted to use the Java libraries and JVM, but we didn’t want to write in Java because we have lots of existing Ruby code. The interpreter runs our code two times faster, and the architectural improvements enabled by JRuby’s proper multi-threading and Java integration allowed us to simplify the application into one process, which overall is five times faster than before. JRuby has given us great performance, allowed us to reduce the lines of code by about 10 percent, and helped us make the application much easier to develop and deploy.”

Developers report they are two to five times more productive programming in Ruby than in Java, according to recent Engine Yard survey data. This is because, unlike other JVM-based Web frameworks, JRuby provides productivity benefits to Java teams including the ability to deploy to the same servers, use the same libraries, and integrate with existing Java code and applications.

For more details on the benefits Ruby can offer Java teams and how to get started with JRuby, developers are invited to download the quick-start guide at http://bit.ly/97UaoD.

“Organizations that made smart investments in Java for its security and reliability are now adding JRuby to their environments because it enables them to take advantage of the productivity benefits Ruby delivers,” said Nutter, in a statement. “Commercial-grade support for JRuby from Engine Yard is another important step toward establishing Ruby on Rails as the best choice for next-generation development in the enterprise.”

A Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, JRuby allows organizations to build secure, high-performance application functionality with Ruby while utilizing existing Java code and the JVM, Engine Yard said. Commercial JRuby support from Engine Yard benefits organizations using both Java and Ruby by providing direct access to the Ruby, Rails and JRuby experts at Engine Yard, the company said.

“JRuby, Ruby on Rails, and the JVM provide a razor sharp tool set to deliver SOA to existing Java applications, along with rapid development of new applications. Combined with our support offering, enterprises will realize a greater ROI on their Java investments,” said Tom Mornini, chief technology officer of Engine Yard, in a statement. “Java-based enterprises demand commercial support for any technology they use—with Engine Yard’s combined engineering expertise in Rails, Ruby and JRuby, our new support offering meets and exceeds that requirement.”

Commercial JRuby support from Engine Yard includes developer assistance and advice on how to tune and optimize JRuby in production environments. It also covers the most recent version of JRuby and the following libraries: jruby-openssl, activerecord-jdbc-adapter, warbler and jruby-rack. And it includes support for bundled JRuby components such as Joni, Yecht and jrubyffi. More information on Engine Yard commercial JRuby support is available at: http://bit.ly/cCYHdG.