I published a short interview with Charles Nutter on Mirah, an attempt to modify the Ruby language ever so slightly to create a new language that can be compiled to bytecode. What differentiates Mirah from Groovy, Scala, and other JVM-based languages is that Nutter wants a language that can compile directly to bytecode with no runtime dependencies.

Read the full interview here

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb2xzeWf-PM&hl=en&fs=1] Read the transcript at O'Reilly News.

Alternative title "You are going to hate this but...."

We Need a Maven Rails Plugin and a Maven Capistrano Plugin

No, I'm serious. Here's why... Everything I touch integrates with Maven, Flex code, DocBook, Java code, JRuby code, etc..... Everything except those two Rails applications that I have to manually deploy using Cap and that one application which is constantly asking me to rake db:migrate the sucker.

Someone just asked me to participate in a five questions piece about the Rails community... interesting, but I wouldn't consider myself a part of the Rails community.

Sometimes people approach a tool like Rails with a set of expectations like "Rails is for AJAX". Someone might helpfully suggest that they take a look at Rails because it makes AJAX very easy. What you don't expect is for someone to come back in a few weeks, with the understanding that Rails is the appropriate framework for implementing a set of Rich component widgets ala Flex. With custom helpers for managing pages with hundreds of ids, and expectations that you are going to have custom slider widgets that manage the dynamic scrolling and insertion of elements in a UL.