Not sure of the future of their project at Oracle, the JRuby team is leaving Sun Microsystems to join
the development team at Engine Yard, a company that specializes in Ruby and
Ruby on Rails development and application hosting.
The move comes three
years after Sun hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the chief
maintainers of the open-source JRuby project, and is based primarily on
"uncertainty" about the future of key Sun technologies under Oracle's
ownership. Nick Sieger, another member of the JRuby core team, also will join
Nutter and Enebo at Engine Yard.
In an interview with eWEEK, Nutter said the main reason for moving JRuby to
a more secure and stable position at a hardcore Ruby/Rails shop like Engine
Yard was "uncertainty about the future and also Engine Yard reaching out
and committing to helping to move JRuby forward."
Engine Yard was not the only place where the JRuby team could have landed.
"Other people approached us, but this felt like the best fit," Nutter
said.
The JRuby team has developed a stable, high-performance Ruby implementation
that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby is a Java implementation of
the Ruby language. JRuby also is showing increasing penetration into the
traditional base of Java developers. And it has become one of the ways that
Java-based Web development shops are adopting Ruby. Meanwhile, Engine Yard has
been quietly amassing a horde of Ruby and Rails talent and projects, and
appears to be emerging as a mecca for Ruby applications development and
hosting.
Overall, this move aligns the JRuby team with the Ruby/Rails experts at
Engine Yard that are focused on helping business and Web developers reap the
benefits of Ruby. For Engine Yard, this move broadens and deepens their support
for Ruby, so they can bring even better offerings to the many businesses that have
major Java investments and that also are working with Ruby and Rails.
Nutter said the team will be working on JRuby at Engine Yard. Meanwhile, Sun
will continue to deliver products that support JRuby, such as NetBeans.
"We enjoyed working for Sun," he said, adding that leaving was a
difficult decision.
Nutter said the move to Engine Yard also will give the JRuby team "a
free hand to work more openly with everybody in the JRuby community."
Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at Engine Yard, said,
"We're really excited to have the JRuby team onboard." He said Engine
Yard will be delivering documentation and commercial support for JRuby in the
future.
Moreover, "We're super-excited to be able to offer JRuby options on our
cloud offering as well," Mullany said.
Nutter offered comparisons between Engine Yard's cloud effort and Google App
Engine, with the advantage of Engine Yard's "understanding of how to run
Ruby in a hosted environment."
"We'll have a first-class Java environment on the Engine Yard
platform," Mullany said.
The JRuby team members will begin working at Engine Yard as early as Aug. 3,
Nutter said.
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