JRuby 1.1.1 in RedHat Fedora

Conrad Meyer of the Fedora project yesterday tossed me this link to a build log from a Fedora build machine for...you guessed it, JRuby. Conrad has been chasing down JRuby bugs, hanging out on IRC and working JRuby through the approval process to be packaged and available in Fedora, and after several months of effort it has happened. JRuby 1.1.1 is in Fedora!

Now that might be enough to make my day, but perhaps even more important is the list of dependency projects that also got shuttled through the system in order for JRuby to build and run.

jna and jna-posix - The Java Native Access library we used to call C library functions like symlink and chmod. Lots of folks are using JRuby, but the POSIX subsystem we've built upon it is now seeing use in Jython and has been split off as a jruby-contrib project. And as of today, jna and jna-posix is in Fedora too.

jline - A readline library for Java applications. JLine was actually already in, but it was a pretty old version. Over the past two years, JRuby's been not only the primary consumer of JLine (that I know of) but we've pushed a bunch of patches back to the project. So the latest JLine with all our patches is in Fedora too.

bytelist - The smallest package in the lot, this comprises exactly *one* class--ByteList--a mutable byte[] wrapper with StringBuffer-like methods. It's the backbone of our Ruby String implementation, and was spun off as a separate project for others to use. And now ByteList is in Fedora too.

jvyamlb - The byte-based version of Ola Bini's JvYAML YAML parser project. This actually represents the third YAML project from Ola, with the first two being the RbYAML library now in use in Rubinius and the char-based JvYAML project that we used to use with char-based String implementation. Now JvYAMLb is in Fedora too.

joda-time - Anyone who's had to do anything nontrivial with Java's many date and time classes will know Joda Time. Arguably the best Java solution to a very tricky problem, we moved to Joda Time a while ago to be able to better match C time API behaviors. Joda Time is in Fedora too.

joni - Saving the best for last. JOni is Marcin Mielzynski's amazing Oniguruma port. Oniguruma is a bytecode-based regular expression engine with lots of additional features like pluggable character encoding support and named groups. It's been the "last mile" for JRuby's String/Regexp support, and solved one of our last big performance bottlenecks: passing our byte-based strings through char-based regex engines. JOni is an incredible piece of work, and now it's in Fedora too.

And the whole ball of wax is building on IcedTea, RedHat's combination of GNU ClassPath and the amazing OpenJDK. We're very happy to know JRuby will be one-command installable for all Fedora users now. And we're looking forward to other Linux distributions making the latest JRuby releases available too :)