No, I’m not changing my mind about Ruby just yet, I’m just building up debate ammo actually.

Anyways…I’ve been trying to read up on Ruby, Rails, and ActiveRecord lately and came across two different technologies I’d like to ask you readers about. The first is JRuby. JRuby is a Java implementation of Ruby, in the same mold as Jython. It allows you to run Ruby code with the JVM and also gives you the ability to use any Java API you have available in the classpath. The question:

If JRuby is stable, why would you ever want to use vanilla Ruby?

Ruby has traditionally had huge threading problems, from what I’ve read, that Java has pretty much nailed down since it improved its memory model in JDK 5.

The next piece of technology I came across was ActiveHibernate. The idea of this project is to allow Hibernate to generate Ruby rather than Java objects when you interact with your database. The project looks a little raw (there’s no downloads), but if you dive down into the code, you see that the implementation is very small. ActiveHibernate uses Hibernate’s dynamic-map entity mode along with a Ruby specific tuplizer, so there’s only a handul of things to implement. JRuby actually has done most of the work for you by providing nice utility methods to convert Java objects to Ruby. I haven’t tried ActiveHibernate out at all, but what you’d be doing is solely defining hbm.xml mapping files. The Hibernate Tools project allows you to point to a DB and generate hbm.xml files (as well as Java classes and even a small website scaffolding like Rails does), so you’d have the same productivity as active record.

Hibernate has caching (2nd level and query), optimistic locking, a rich query language, and rich mapping strategies. They have also thought about migration strategies as well. So the question is:

If ActiveHibernate is viable why would you ever want to use ActiveRecord?

There are so many great technologies in Java land beyond Hibernate that you are able to leverage with languages that run on top of the JVM. If you believe dynamic un-typesafe languages are the future (i’m not one of them BTW), then don’t you think we should be leveraging all this old technology?

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Red Hat (NYSE: RHT - News), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that their JBoss division which they acquired for $350 million dollars back in June, 2006, will undergo a complete rebranding of their product line. JBoss will be rebranded to JMoss. The move is expected to skyrocket sales and take the old JBoss product line to an undefeated presence in the middleware market.

“Having boss as your brand is one thing. I like being the boss, but having Moss be the cornerstone of your brand turns a great team into an unbeatable one,” said Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat. “The executive team, being Massachusetts natives, are all behind such a move,” said Paul Cormier, Executive VP of Engineering, “One of our engineers, Bill Burke, came up with the idea while watching our local football team embarrass an overrated opponent over the weekend. I thought it fit, so I passed the idea along to Matthew.” When Sacha Labourey, CTO of the JMoss division, heard that the rebranding was inspired by Masschusett’s american football team he said, “Us Europeans realize that american football is the best sport in the world and that soccer is for girly men, so I’m 100% behind the rebranding.”

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JMoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Edited 12/11: I can’t believe I have to say this, but a couple of people thought this entry was real.  GUYS, its just for fun!