The JRuby compiler is complete. I am eager to try running statzen in JRuby.
The troubles of Twitter put doubts into the back of the mind of ever Rails developer. Sure, Basecamp doesn’t go down like that, but Twitter does and they can’t seem to be able to fix it. That may all be a moot point if JRuby is successful. If the Java community knows how to do anything it is scale big apps.
Take horizontal scaling for instance. Right now I think the only way to have a cluser of Rails application servers is to have all of the sessions reside in a place that is global to all app servers (typically the database). With JRuby it should be possible to use (potentially faster) file-based sessions and route requests to the appropriate app server using mod_jk.
There are some (over)simple benchmarks for JRuby vs MRI (the primary Ruby interpreter, written in C). JRuby appears to get beat in all cases. Of course, I am pretty sure this is JRuby running in interpreted mode; a compiled JRuby application should run much, much faster. It will be interesting to know if compiled JRuby is still processor bound in those tests.
Did you catch that about interpreted and compiled JRuby? Yeah, both still work. So that means you can still have the rapid development cycle without having to compile the app, and then deploy compiled code to production. To me, this is the best possible scenario; I have wanted this for years (I had hoped for this very thing from PHP 4-5 years ago).
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Perl.
You know, I thought about mentioning mod_perl, which is the closest thing to getting it right (I think aside from JRuby). Then there is Parot which will make it much more interesting.