Due to the nigh insurmountable work of Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Ola Bini and Nick Sieger along with their team we have direct access to Java libraries and thus to a plethora of usefulness. Sometimes I think we forget how lucky we are, the Ruby community, to have such awesome people simplifying our lives, anyway, thats quite enough arse kissing. So, on with the show...

Anthony Buck

In Distributed Ruby - Exploiting Enterprise Software, Anthony riffs on using JRuby as a way for Rubyists to "exploit" robust, enterprise-grade libraries. This isn't a new topic but his demonstration is particularly compelling (and worth scrolling down for).

Hazelcast is an "in memory data grid" that's fail-safe (with regard to crashes) and that automatically scales across the number of nodes within the system. Anthony's code works fine out of the box with JRuby 1.5.1 running under RVM (yep, I tested) and demonstrates what is a particularly powerful Java library I'd never heard of before. It's excellent we have access to this from Ruby, and Anthony's right - the JRuby team deserves credit for giving Rubyists opportunities to both "exploit" enterprise technologies and to deploy systems in enterprise environments without having to jump ship with Ruby.