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

Developing with JRuby is interesting, but it is also something of a challenge to deploy. If you develop applications deployed with JRuby Rack, I'm guessing that you probably don't bother starting a JRuby Rack web application as a part of your development cycle. In my experience, JRuby Rack is great, but the startup times are challenging. The solution? (It isn't satisfying...) Use C-Ruby during development and start Rails with "ruby scripts/server".

[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.