The Great JRuby Japanese Tour

Yes, friends, it's time one again for a JRuby tour. This trip, we're localizing to the islands of Japan. Do I have any Japanese readers out there?

Here's our route for this trip...it's going to be a crazy ten days:

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June 19: Tsukuba, Ruby Kaigi

Tom Enebo and I will be presenting JRuby at the Ruby Kaigi 2008 in Tsukuba this year, as well as meeting up with other Ruby implementers making the trip and communing with the locals. The Kaigi was great last year...lots of fun, great company, and an excellent community. We're both really excited about it. JRuby has come a long way, so we'll be doing a whirlwind tour of performance, Rails, GUI support, and finishing off with something special. It should be a great conference again this year.

June 23: Matsue, Lecture at Shimane University, Meetup with Matz and Locals

We were invited to present JRuby at Shimane University, as part of a lecture series they're doing on Ruby. And since Matz is based on Matsue, we'll certainly meet up with him to talk a bit offline...I expect he'll be pulled many directions at the Kaigi.

June 24: Fukuoka, Ruby Business Commons

Tom did a keynote last year for the Ruby Business Commons, a group of Rubyists proactively trying to bring Ruby to the business community. I suspect we'll deliver another talk or just meet up with them and see how things have progressed in the past year. At any rate, Tom enjoyed the trip to Fukuoka, so I'm looking forward to this.

June 25-27: Tokyo, meetup with local partners, universities, Rubyists?

Whenever Tom and I travel to Japan or meet up with Japanese associates, we put ourselves entirely in the hands of Sun Japan, and specifically our excellent friend and guide Takashi Shitamichi. So far, the Tokyo leg of our trip has a few embedded question marks, but I'm sure Shitamichi-san will be able to fill our days from dawn until dusk with events. Hopefully we'll have a little time to take a breath and poke around Tokyo again, but either way it will be a great end to the tour.

Spreading the Word

I'd really like to jam in as much Ruby and JRuby meetups, discussions, and talks as possible on this trip, so feel free to reblog (and perhaps translate) this entry, contact me, Tom, and Takashi directly...especially if you know of any good events while we're in Tokyo. And if you're press, Takashi can certainly hook you up if there's time in the tour (for emails...use firstname.lastname@sun.com).

JRuby is ready for the Japanese Ruby community, and we're coming to town to help send it off!