Sun Revs JRuby

The Sun Microsystems team building a Java implementation of the Ruby language is releasing a new beta version of the technology as well as an update to another branch of the JRuby interpreter.

Sun officials on Nov. 7 unveiled the launch of JRuby 1.1 beta 1 as the first release towards the companys goal of JRuby 1.1. Sun hired the lead developers, Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, on the open-source JRuby project last year, and the JRuby team announced Version 1.0 of JRuby in June.

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Now JRuby 1.1 represents a concerted focus on speed and refinement, Enebo said in a blog post.

"Ruby code can completely compile in an Ahead Of Time or Just In Time mode, yielding a faster Ruby," Enebo said. "It uses less memory than our previous releases."

The release is the teams most compatible release with the Ruby 1.8 compiler, which is a stable version of Ruby. Ruby 1.8.6 is the most recent stable release of Ruby.

Meanwhile, the JRuby team announced JRuby 1.0.2, a minor release of the JRuby stable 1.0 branch, which supports users using JRuby in production, Enebo said.

"The fixes in this release include primarily obvious compatibility issues that we felt were low risk," Enebo said in his blog. "We periodically push out point releases to continue supporting production users of JRuby 1.0.x."

Highlights of the JRuby 1.0.2 release include fixing "several nasty issues" for users on Windows, fixing a number of network compatibility issues, including support for Ruby on Rails 1.2.5, as well as reduced memory footprint and improved file I/O performance.

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