Question

I’m interested in promoting JRuby in our office as the platform hosting Rails applications.

But how reliable is it?

Is its performance better than MRI 1.8.7?

JRuby 1.5 states that it is 100% compatible with Ruby 1.8.7, does this mean that JRuby can run any Ruby/Rails code?

Answer 1

I am doing a lot of jruby work right now and can tell you that rails is certainly a viable option under the jruby interpreter. I’ve been pretty pleased and in my case have to use many native Java libraries, so jRuby is just such an awesome wrapper around that java code. I will say that I have had some technical challenges some that are worked out, some that are not yet.

1. unit testing: spooling up the jvm and then spooling up rails takes much longer, so your tests take longer to run – solution, potentially something like nailgun that keeps the jvm running
2. deployment: i have not gotten warbler to work for me, with my flavor of tomcat. this is a major issue for us.
3. pick your libraries, while some c extensions work, they are not all equally compatible.

if you are interested I would highly reccomend the jruby book, in beta, from Pragmantic Programmers at http://pragprog.com