Following on five months after the release of the popular JRuby 1.4, the JRuby team have delivered JRuby 1.5!

In order to execute Ruby code as fast as possible, Rubinius has the ability to compile Ruby code all the way down to machine code when it detects that a method is heavily used. In Rubinius, the system that manages this process is its JIT.

In today’s post, I’ll be giving an overview of the various players involved in the path that code takes to get from source to machine code. Without further ado, I’ll jump right in.

Vagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments.

Over the last few months, we’ve been seeing increasing number of requests about our SLA (Service Level Agreement) – do we have one? if not then why not? and so on.

We’ve been reasonably resistant to publishing an SLA until now, not because of doubts over our infrastructure or ability to deliver, but because of the minimal value we felt it would add for customers in the event of actual downtime. We’re a pragmatic bunch at Brightbox and like to avoid adding things just for the sake of it or “because everyone else does” :)

The current JRuby team members are all passionate hackers with intimate knowledge of Ruby, Java, and of course JRuby. That said, none of us were on the team at the project’s original inception. I assume the JRuby pioneers thought JRuby would be a good idea—I know I did, when I first heard about it. For a lot of folks though, it’s somewhat less obvious. Why is writing JRuby on top of the JVM a good idea, they ask. Are we nuts, evil geniuses, or is using the JVM just a solid pragmatic decision?