This is big news — Sun, while in the midst of reducing its workforce, has hired JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. It appears that this was the doing of Tim Bray. They will be paid to bring JRuby to a 1.0 status. This is something I hadn’t expected and I think my jaw is laying on the floor! Anyway, you can read all about in Tim’s blog post.
UPDATE: You should also read Charles Nutter’s blog post on this. Besides his perspective on the deal, he is also maintaining a list of links to major news reports on this.
It looks like Sun is beginning to see the wisdom of Microsoft's hiring of Jim Hugunin, especialy with the recent release of IronPython 1.0.
So now we have Microsoft championing Python, and Sun championing Ruby. Actualy these are quite good fits. Python has strong desktop capabilities, which has always been a Microsoft speciality, and Ruby is finding a strong following in the web development space, which is a Sun/Java speciality.
It's a shame they couldn't have standardised on the same dynamic language, but choice and differentiation are both good things in themselves.
Another Hibbs
Yes, Sun is having trouble with Java's future, in spite of the heavy popularity of the language on a business level..Already in Java meetings there has been talks about 'after Java what?'... EJB 3.0 is supposed to fix serious errors in EJB 2.0 implementation,,, which means EJB2 CMP and Entity Beans never worked...
So Sun having done many not-so-correct things, has now embraced Ruby, JavaScript and even PHP!
Interesting to see how ruby will be used alongwith Java applications.
gopi nathan