JRuby

# scripting.rbinclude Scriptablex = 'Hello'y = 'world'groovy <<Gdef z = 'multilanguage'println("${x}, ${z} ${y}")Gjavascript <<JSz = 'multilanguage'println(x ', ' z ' ' y)JS# both => "Hello, multilanguage world!"

I've spent some time this weekend looking over the Grails codebase. After a truly gigantic checkout (Grails bundles production JARs for all the libraries it integrates) and after swimming through a substantial, single-project sea of source files, I ... [More] think I'm starting to follow it (though a tour by someone familiar with Grails internals would be nice). But there's something else I've learned in the process...There's really no reason this couldn't use Ruby just as easily as Groovy.Let's look at some really dumb numbers. Grails, as it turns out, is actually over 2/3 Java code, unlike Rails which is 100% Ruby. Grails contains around 436 Java source files for about 54kloc of code and 273 Groovy source files for about 23kloc of code. So Java outnumbers Groovy by a 2:1 ratio. And yes, Java's probably more verbose than Groovy in most cases. But my point stands, and I'll back it up with more...Then there's the libraries. The Grails binary release weighs in at a whopping 26MB compressed and 49MB uncompressed (*wow*). But 31MB of that is third-party libraries completely independent of Groovy, things like Hibernate, XFire, Quartz, Apache Commons, and so on. Almost all of which (or perhaps all of which) are pure Java code. So the ratio is even more heavily toward Java.These numbers and my exploration of the code base lead me to a surprising conclusion: Grails is not a "Groovy on Rails" by any means. It's a large number of popular, well-established Java libraries stitched together mostly by Java code with a thin layer at the front (20kloc is not much) of Groovy code for end-users to see and work with. And I guarantee you it's not the Groovy part that's most interesting here. Hell, you could write that part in Java if you followed enough "convention over configuration", and you certainly could write it in Ruby.I decided to do this exploration after realizing there's nothing about Ruby or JRuby that couldn't be used to wire a bunch of Java libraries together--indeed, that's one of the biggest selling points of JRuby, the fact that you can write plain old Ruby code but call Java libraries almost seamlessly (with day-by-day improving integration points and performance numbers). So why not take Grails and do a port to Ruby? Groovy code isn't far off from Ruby in many ways, and everything you can do in Groovy you can do in Ruby (plus more), so the port should be pretty straightforward, right?Then I find out that Grails is mostly Java code. And instead of being annoyed or repulsed by this revelation, I was intrigued. Why not make Grails work with Ruby as well? And really, why not make it work with any scripting language? Why limit that nicely-integrated back end by forcing everyone to use Groovy, regardless of preference? Have we learned nothing from a decade of "100% Pure Java"?So I propose the following.I believe it would be possible to completely isolate Grails' tastier bits from Groovy. I don't claim it would be easy, but Grails is fairly well interfacified, injectificated, and abstractilicious, so making that dividing line clear and bold is certainly possible (and heck, that's the point of dependency injection and component frameworks anyway, isn't it?). Really, I could start implementing a few of those interfaces right now with Ruby code, but that's not the right approach.Grails' value is not in Groovy, but in the clean integration of established libraries behind the "Convention Over Configuration" mantra. There's nothing specifically Groovy (or Ruby) about that religion, and there's nothing Groovy does in Grails that another JVM language couldn't do just as easily. This is *truth*. And Grails would benefit tremendously by expanding to other languages. Being tied to Groovy alone will hold it back (just as a framework tied to any one language will be held back, Ruby included).I also believe that if the Grails project doesn't make an official effort in this direction, others are likely to take up that mantle themselves. Though the debates will forever rage about which JVM dynlang should carry us into the future, the same facts that have guided programming for half a century still apply today: No one language will be enough to carry us forward; no languages will survive indefinitely; and the language you'll use in ten years you've probably not even heard of yet. Did anyone expect Java to be the most widely-used, widely-deployed language ten years ago? Well today, it is. It won't always be.There's also a very interesting angle here for language enthusiasts. Nobody doubts that the Java platform is officially becoming multi-lingual, possibly a complete reversal from years past. But there are going to be growing pains here, and we're already feeling them on some projects at Sun. We have this wonderful platform with all these wonderful languages...and they all do things differently. We have a first stab at official "Scripting" support in JSR-223, but it only defines the integration point from Java to the language in question...only partially defining the integration points for those languages calling back to Java (a tricky problem) and defining *nothing* related to making those languages interoperate with each other. Again, Java becomes the integration point, and the bottleneck (as in "how do you pass a dynamic-typed object from one language to another by sending it through a statically typed language?"). The very exercise of making Grails (or any other framework) work equally well across multiple user-facing language interfaces will require better interoperability and more clearly-defined integration points for dynamic and static languages on the JVM.The Phobos guys at Sun are already tackling many of these same problems while expanding their JavaScript-mostly Rails-inspired web framework to other JSR-223 languages (notably, Ruby). So anyone taking on the Grails effort would certainly not be alone, and there are some damn smart engineers at Sun interested in tackling these very same problems.And I guess in the end it's a question of how visionary we all can be. Can the Grails team envision a future for Grails that doesn't require the use of Groovy? Are you (and am I) as a non-Groovy developer willing to help them get there? And in the end, isn't this what thought leaders on a multi-lingual platform are supposed to be doing?--So, enough of the inflammatory bull-baiting. I dare you to tell me why I'm wrong here. Even better, I dare you to look into it yourself. 75kloc of code, only a third of it Groovy. Established libraries you're sure to have used at some point. Clean integration, following the principals inspired and proven by Rails.But fronted with your language of choice.Make it so. [Less]

See, here's the deal. I'm not a very advanced IDE user. I used Eclipse for years and JDE before that, and I wouldn't ever have considered myself a "pro" with either. I learned what I needed to get the job done and not a whole lot else. Beyond that I ... [More] never knew some of the coolest features, and was never so good at convincing people to make a switch. This actually has helped my migration to NetBeans, since it basically does all the things I was used to in Eclipse. But it has been problematic when I try to convey how cool the new NetBeans Ruby support really is.It's super cool. It does things I've not seen any other IDE or editor do.However, it's best not to take my advice, and Roumen Strobl has recorded two seriously excellent demonstrations of Rails and Ruby support in NetBeans. They make the sale way better than I could (though I now have many good ideas for how to sell it better in the future).If you have any interest in Ruby editors or IDEs, you should take the time and watch these, especially the Ruby support.Two Demos: JRuby on Rails and Advanced Ruby Editing in NetBeans! [Less]

Things have been moving quickly in JRuby-land, and we've just kicked out a major release in JRuby 0.9.8. Among the big features:Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and override methodsNew Java primitive array syntaxReimplementation ... [More] of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more correct and performantSignificant bottlenecks have been identified. In some cases IO is 6.5x faster than previous releases. Java included classes are significantly faster than in the past.220 Jira issues resolved since last releaseNow these are certainly delicious. Performance improvements are always great, and we're been improving Java integration little by little. But there's another bullet I omitted that is worth a little more attention:Ruby on Rails supportNow you may feel free to read that as you wish. I read it as "we expect pure-Ruby Rails apps to work." By "pure Ruby", I mean no unsupported C-language extensions required. By "work" I mean "work."It was our original plan over two months ago that by Februrary's end we'd be passing enough of Rails' own test cases to call it "supported". And in a relative rarity for an open source project, we hit that milestone. It was actually early last week we started saying we officially support Rails, which at the time meant better than 95% of Rails test cases passing. By the time we cleaned up the remaining release items, we had passed 98%. And we're still climbing.So what does this mean for a practical Rails user? Well, it means that the dream of deploying Rails apps on any Java-based server in any Java-based organization is another big step closer to coming true. I've actually been demoing Rails apps running in a WAR file on GlassFish for all my recent talks, and it's pretty solid. I don't imagine it's perfect, of course, but it's looking really very good. It will be "ready" by the time we hit 1.0.A few folks have been wondering about the jump from JRuby 0.9.2 to JRuby 0.9.8. The simple answer is this: we're two releases away from 1.0. We wanted to make it obvious how much work has gone into 0.9.8 (as many SVN revisions in this release as the last three combined) and show our commitment to getting a 1.0 release out very soon. The 0.9.8 release will be followed by 0.9.9, which will be followed by...well, you get the picture. We're in the home stretch now.The other core team members have reported on the release, so I won't cover all that. Here's a list of links:Tom EneboOla BiniNick SiegerIn related news, there's also a new release of ActiveRecord-JDBC, the gem-installable module enabling JDBC databases to be used by ActiveRecord. This is also very welcome, since there have been a number of bug fixes in trunk that weren't easily installable the past couple months. Now you should be able to run both Rails 1.2.2 and 1.1.6 well with JRuby, just using released code. It helps complete the puzzle.So what's next for JRuby? Well, with the 0.9.8 release we've reached a really big milestone as far as Ruby compatibility, so we're likely to turn our attentions toward areas not directly related to Ruby 1.8. Specifically:Work will continue on the bytecode compiler, and I'm hoping to have the JIT permanently enabled within the next weekJava integration will get a heavier focus, to start bringing us more in line with languages like Groovy for ease-of-integration. In general things are looking pretty solid right now, but we know there's a lot of work to do here. I'd like for us to come as close as possible to Groovy's level of tight integration as possible.We will also start working on native Unicode support, by exposing a Chars class like the one provided in Rails' MultiByte library. This will allow us to maintain compatibility with Ruby and provide solid Unicode support without introducing an incompatible set of features.Both Tom and Ola have expressed an interest in continuing work on our Ruby 2.0 bytecode engine. Ola would like to continue improving and expanding the bytecode support, while Tom would like to play with a second parser that goes straight to bytecode. Both of those will help feed into a potentially faster interpreted mode in the future, giving us many of the perf gains shown in Ruby 1.9 benchmarks.For me personally, performance is going to be the big item. The recent Ruby Shootout showed that we have some work to do to bring out performance up to MRI standards, but it didn't tell the whole story. The truth of the matter is more like this:JRuby interpreted mode is roughly 3-4x as slow as Ruby 1.8JRuby compiled mode is roughly 1.5-2x faster than Ruby 1.8KRI (Ruby 1.9, "Koichi's Ruby Implementation") is many times faster than MRI for the posted benchmarksKRI is 2x or less faster than MRI for the general caseAnd this is without us doing any optimization of the compiler or adding in any special-case optimizations like KRI provides for fixnums. We're still looking great for future performance, and I want to start tackling this area heavily over the next couple months.As always, we welcome contributors, bug reports, patches, and user anecdotes for JRuby. We love to hear about bugs, we want to know your opinion, and we respect and honor our community whenever we get the chance. Remember, JRuby is your project, and can only be successful with your help.Visit www.jruby.org to learn more about the project, download the release, and get involved!On to the next release! [Less]

We released 0.9.8 this afternoon.  Here is the announcement:The JRuby team is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 0.9.8. Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/This release has some great improvements:- Ruby on ... [More] Rails support.  We have been working hard on getting Rails own unit tests running and over 98% of them now run successfully.  We feel things are running well enough to invite Ruby users to kick the tires and help root out any final issues.- Ruby classes can extend concrete/abstract Java classes and     override methods- New Java primitive array syntax- Reimplementation of String, Numeric classes, and Array to be more correct  and performant- Significant bottlenecks have been identified.  In some cases IO is 6.5x faster than previous releases.  Java included classes are significantly faster than in the past.- 225 Jira issues resolved since last releaseAt the beginning of this development cycle we added Nick Sieger as a committer to JRuby.  Nick has been a welcome addition to the team.Special thanks to Marcin Mielżyński for his tireless work in rewriting a number of core classes to be much more correct and quick.  His attention to detail has rooted out many corner cases.  The amount of IRC conversations, mailing list threads, bug reports, patches, and blog entries in the community has been a great help and our community is really making a huge difference in how fast JRuby is improving.  The amountof progress is really staggering....I ran out of time to give some examples of the new Java array primitive syntax on our wiki or examples of extending concrete classes.  I plan on adding some to the wiki and perhaps I will blog them here too.As an additional note this release had many more fixes than noted in the 225 Jira issues listed.  Some of these fixes corrected a whole class of error and not what most would consider a single issue.   We really are moving fast and I am looking forward to where we will be in the next few months. [Less]

After my adventures in Hyderabad, the next stop on the tour took me to the heart of India's IT industry, where I would present my TechDays talk again for Sun Microsystems' Indian Engineering Center. But I scheduled in a little free time as well, to ... [More] do some exploring.I arrived on Saturday the 24th after a short flight on Sahara Air. For once, my travel arrangements worked out, and I was able to buy my ticket upon arriving at the Hyderabad airport. A few hours later, I had landed in Bangalore. A hotel car was waiting for me (this is now only the second time I've had a car waiting with my name on a sign, and I think I like it), so I headed straightaway to the Richmond Hotel in central Bangalore.The Richmond has a fairly old-world feel, apparently having been converted from an apartment or office building some time in the past. It had a musty smell, but was otherwise pretty clean and well-kept. I'm generally more comfortable in "clean and comfortable" hotels than in "pristine" hotels like the Novotel, so the Richmond was just fine. That night I made arrangements for the next day's tour, ordered in some room service, and caught up on sleep.It still amazes me how everything has changed since blogging became mainstream. Even as short as five years ago, I had a devil of a time finding local tour guides for my travels. Generally the best bet was to fork over too much money to a paid guide or to travel with a tour group. Neither of those are really conducive to free-form exploration, so I've always been forced to strike out on my own. But those days are certainly behind us.In response to my "World Tour" blog posts, I had no less than 5 different people offer to show me around Bangalore. They ranged from JRuby enthusiasts to casual readers, and for once I had more guide offers than I could use. So I settled on the first two to contact me: K "Venkat" Venkatsubramaniyan and Håkan Raberg.Venkat was up first on Sunday the 25th. He had actually stopped into the JRuby IRC channel (#jruby on FreeNode) as well as emailing me. His plan for the day included a trip to a cultural/folk center outside the city, lunch and dinner at a couple places to be determined, and shopping stops for a few things I wanted to purchase. So we started out bright and early at 9AM.We made the following stops, in order:Rajarajeshwari Temple in western Bangalore, where I paid my respects and was gifted with a wreath of flowers and a tilak on my forehead. It was a moving experience, even though I felt a bit out of place in my western clothes. And the classical architecture of this modern shrine was quite impressive.Janapada Loka (Folk-Cultural World), a collection of folk art museums and exihibits on the road from Bangalore to Mysore.Kamath Yathrinivas Restaurant, where I had my first traditional Indian meal, complete with banana-leaf plate and eating with my hands. It was very tasty.Nalli Silk Arcade, to purchase sarees for my wife. I think I was the only guy in there shopping, other than a few poor saps who were obviously dragged along by their wives.Cauvery Crafts Emporium on Mahatma Ghandi Road, a nice collection of handicrafts, clothes, and nick-nacks, but very much tailored to western tourists. I looked at pearls for my wife briefly here, but decided not to buy.Navaratna Jeweleries, up the road from Cauvery, where I found the pearls I wanted. I went back on Tuesday before flying home to have the string extended and a clasp put on.Garuda Mall and Bangalore Central Mall...we just kinda ended up here looking for a place to buy tea and wasting time before our evening's restaurant opened.Amaravathi Restaurant, another more traditional place (more banana leaves and eating with hands), but this time with some delicious spicy curries and a crab dish as tasty as it was difficult to eat.Venkat was an excellent guide, and I can certainly claim a new friend in Bangalore.Monday the 26th was my day on the spot at Sun Microsystems. Conveniently, Sun's office in Bangalore was only about two blocks from the Richmond, so I headed over at around 10AM to prepare for my 11AM talk.For some reason, every Sun office I visit is a terrific maze of doors, offices, and cubicals. The Menlo Park office has all L-shaped buildings with multiple intersecting hallways. Santa Clara's offices are plus-shaped (I think) which is often even more confusing. The Bangalore office put them to shame. It is hosted on the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th floors of a circular building with a central unsecured walkway and multiple secure entries and exits as you progress around the outer ring of offices. What complicated things most was that hallways extended out from the center of the ring like spokes of a wheel, but the perpendicular hallways did not always curve to match the circle. This meant that hallways often met at bizarre angles, and it was impossible to maintain any sense of direction. I got lost more than once wandering around, and unlike the California offices, I had no guarantee that following a given hallway would eventually lead me to an outside wall. Bizarre.Anyway, I did the same talk from TechDays for Sun folks from 11AM to 12PM. Unfortunately, I had lost favor with the demo gods. My NetBeans demonstration froze up and refused to come back. My Rails demo failed with an error I still haven't isolated. And because of a peculiar scheduling snafu, the last 15 minutes of my talk had to be condensed into five minutes, resulting in more errors and a very flustered presentation. What had gone perfectly a few days earlier at TechDays went very poorly at Sun. Luckily, it seems to have still been well-received, and the classic JIRB demo was enough to wow the crowd.The rest of the day was spent meeting with various folks at the IEC, talking about their projects and how JRuby could help. There's some cool stuff coming out of Sun India, so keep your eyes and ears open over the next few months.Monday night my new friend Hakan Raberg from ThoughtWorks arranged to meet with me and two other ThoughtWorkers for dinner. It turns out Hakan is an old friend of Anders Bengsston, one of the premier JRuby contributors in the old days before I joined the project. Such a small world.As a nice change of pace, the ThoughtWorkers and I had dinner at Barbeque Nation, a trendy, modern-feeling restaurant featuring fairly traditional northern Indian cuisine. In other words, lots of meat. Barbeque Nation is one of those "cook it yourself" places, where the center of the table is a small charcoal stove and the meats are delivered mostly-cooked on metal skewers. After marinating with a choice of marinades and allowing the food to cook the last 10% of the way, a delicious entree results. To make it even more acceptable to a western eater: it's all-you-can-eat, with skewers continually delivered until you tell them to stop. For the first time in a week, I was stuffed. It's very hard to turn down delicious seasoned and grilled meats when they keep arriving in front of you.The ThoughtWorkers also had a number of interesting projects going on, many related to Ruby and a couple likely to use JRuby in the near future. Hakan had even worked on a code-generated implementation of the JRuby selector table's switch statements, which he promised to tidy up and send me. It could be very useful for us to optimize user-created classes in the same way we're starting to optimize core classes, and it was actually a technique we considered doing ourselves. More on that as it develops.Tuesday, I packed up and checked out of the hotel. I was a little sad to be leaving Bangalore, but since I still had an entire day before my flight I walked up to M.G. Road to take care of some last minute souvenir shopping. My first stop was at Navaratna Jewelers for the modifications to my wife's new pearl necklace I mentioned earlier. While I waited for the work to be completed, I visited a few shops off the main boulevard and purchased the following items to bring home:A small wooden Ganesha (about 4" tall), to bring success and prosperity to my office.A small wooden Emblem of India, atop a 4" wooden column with a felt base. It is a perfect reminder of my Indian adventure (and probably the coolest national emblem I know). This is my favorite souvenir by far.A small wooden puzzle box for my son.Two larger versions of the puzzle-box with hand-painted images of Indian women on the tops.I had also previously purchased the following items:Two silk ties with different images of dancing elephants on them.Two painted clay hippopotamuses, as gifts for whoever.A comic/cartoon book of stories of "Heroes of the Mahabharata", for my boy to read.For lunch, I was not feeling particularly adventurous, and also decided something familiar might be safest before 24 hours of plane flights, so I ate at Pizza Hut. Yeah, I know. It wasn't even that good.Comfortably full from lunch and loaded down with all my new possessions, I returned to the hotel to catch a cab to the airport. Goodbye, Bangalore...or so I thought.Bangalore Airport was to be a baffling ordeal. People were lined up for a solid block to get into the terminal, mostly encumbered with a half-dozen bags each. To confuse even more, there was an option whereby non-flying visitors could pay for admission to the terminal. Luckily, I figured out I didn't have to pay, and after muscling my way to the entrance, I moved on to the second challenge in this travel gauntlet: Thai Airways had no reservation for me.My original tickets to India were incorrectly issued to "Charles Onutter", an unfortunate combination of my middle initial and last name. Normally, this wouldn't have been a big deal, but apparently international flights are extremely strict about the name for which tickets are issued. If it doesn't match your passport exactly, you're out of luck and can't check in. In a flurry of activity the day before I left, I managed to arrange new tickets. But because it was such short notice, I would have to buy two of my tickets at the originating airports: Sahara Air from Hyderabad to Bangalore and Thai Airways from Bangalore to Bangkok. Sahara air went fine...either because they found my reservation or because they had plenty of room on the flight. But Thai Airways had cancelled my reservation because they overbooked the flight.Luckily, after talking to the ticket agents and American Express's emergency travel service, I was able to purchase an unused seat for the flight. I would fly first-class to Bangkok. I rushed through security, ran to the gate, and finally settled into my seat. Onward to the next stop in the tour: Bangkok, Thailand! [Less]

I have many pictures to share, but they will have to wait for an updated post. Allow your imagination to escort you for now.So! I had been trapped in the "green zone" at the Novotel Hyderabad for two solid days, and I think I just finally had enough ... [More] of it. The Novotel is surrounded by about five acres of land, and the edge of that property terminates with a heavy fence (or wall in places) with either barbed wire or razor wire keeping the rabble out...or perhaps keeping the westerners in? I had taken a few strolls on the grounds, and after walking a few hundred meters from one end to the other this morning, I realized I was tired of living in the bubble. It was time to leave.A number of folks had expressed interest in escorting me into and around Hyderabad, but nothing materialized. Since this was my last chance to see the city, and potentially the last time I'd be in Hyderabad for many years, I had to take matters into my own hands. I asked the front desk for a map, a guidebook, and a few recommendations. Then the transportation desk set up a cab ride to my first destination, Charminar, the square, four-towered heart of the city. It was a perfect if clichéd place to start my day of exploration.Unfortunately, Charminar is also right in the heart of the "old city", the other half of Hyderabad housing the less privileged portion of the population. Charminar itself was certainly astounding. Even though the minarets were closed, the view from the top main floor was quite impressive. In each of the four directions, thoroughfares stretched off into the distance, revealing a bustling mass of humanity. I could see the swarming rickshaws, the teeming bazaar, and the hoards of Hyderabadi citizens going about their lives. It was humbling really. But it was a bit more personal once I descended back into those masses to find my next destination.India has truly awakened. Here more than anywhere I have visited the contrast between technology and tradition is grossly apparent. Construction projects involve teams of mean working by hand, like ants assembling a colony. But every ant has a cell phone with text messaging and a camera. In the streets, beggars clutch at you constantly, but often speak extremely capable English and understand the western world. Above, signs advertise BizTalk Server and Oracle Training. Below, people sleep in the streets and beg for pennies in roaring traffic. And in the streets of Hyderabad this paradoxical turmoil boils unabated.So I climbed back down the stairs of Charminar, a bit concerned for my future. Walking out the secured gate, I was immediately mobbed by beggars, young and old. A few (usually the youngest) spoke surprisingly good English. They asked where I was from, what I needed, where I was going. Some (the older members of the hoard) only knew what they needed to elicit a response from western hearts and minds..."food"..."baby"..."hungry"..."please". Why exactly had I decided to launch into this city alone? Ahh, for adventure, I remember. And what happens at this point in an adventure? When the odds and numbers are stacked against you? A gallant escape, with nary a rupee spared. How noble of me.No, I did not make a contribution to the Hyderabadi poor. I certainly could have. Is it heartless of me? I don't think so; to have made one contribution would have certainly brought a torrent upon me, and it was already a worrisome situation. Instead, I made for a nest of rickshaws near the monument. One particularly bold youth, Abdul, stepped out of the crowd with a map of monuments, a plan for visiting them, and a welcoming smile. He was a salesman with exactly the product I needed, and for the next six hours he would be my guide. Off we went.One of the previous would-be escorts had suggested Golkonda Fort as a place I should not miss. So naturally, with a friendly and aware guide at my side, that was the next place to visit.Golkonda is the ruined former home of the Qutub Shahis, before they moved their home to what is now Hyderabad. It is an extensive maze of towers, walls, tunnels, temples, mosques, and overlooks atop a the highest hill in the area. After climbing several hundred feet to the summit, the sprawl of the city extends in all directions. No other view in Hyderabad gives such a complete picture of its size and extent. The fort itself is also impressive, with four-story defensive walls, a remarkable acoustic communication system, and numerous gardens tucked away behind tunnels and through towering arches. The climb to the top required a few breaks, during which Abdul told me what he knew of the fort's history in broken English and snapped photos of me at the major landmarks.Eventually, we descended, and headed for the next stop on the tour: the Qutub Shahi Tombs.There were seven Qutub Shahi kings, and they are all interned here in monumental tombs. Each tomb hosts an enormous dome (complete with perfect acoustics for singing, chanting, or tourists clapping and hooting), multiple entrances and side-tunnels, and inside the center, a symbolic (or perhaps more-than-symbolic?) monument to the hosted monarch. Most of the tombs contain a single such monument, but one had three: mother, father, and child. There are tombs here for the seven kings, many of their wives, and other relations. The writing on the monuments is in Arabic. That on the tour signs, in Telugu. Both Hindi and Muslim visit and pay their respects. And the city surrounds. I would say that the Qutub Shahi Tombs are at least as important a stop as the Golkonda Fort. If you are to visit the height of the kings' success, you should at least say an appropriate goodbye.The rest of my adventure is somewhat less compelling, but perhaps still interesting. Hyderabad as we know it in the western world is really two cities to the Indians: Hyderabad and Secunderabad. In a peculiar quirk of fate, this pair is known to most Indians as "The Twin Cities", just like my home towns of Minneapolis and St Paul are known to Minnesotans (and many Americans) as "The Twin Cities". The very center of Hyderabad, bridging these two cities, is a large lake called Hussein Sagal. Arriving here, I have come full-circle to the heart of the "Twin Cities" on the other side of the world. Unfortunately, the interesting part of that story ends here. Hussein Sagal now appears to be little more than a tourist trap, firmly ensconced in the "new" part of the city. It is surrounded by miraculous science museums and modern family amusement parks. Put simply, I had no interest in anything more than driving past. Yes, it's a large lake in the middle of the city. Yes, there's a 60-foot-tall Buddha standing in the center. The noise of the traffic surrounding and the lights of the shopping malls and Pepsi signs tends to dampen any beauty or majesty that once was there. We moved on.One item I had expressed interest in when talking to the front desk was "shopping". Unfortunately, we had different definitions of shopping. To me, shopping was visiting a "bazaar of the people", where I could browse sarees for my wife, hand-made toys for my son, and myriad other handicraft and localities. To the hotel, shopping meant "Macy's".360s, $1 The final stop on my 8-hour Hyderabad tour was, sadly, the LifeStyle department store. It wasn't a bad store, really, since it did host a few local items and the prices were a little better than those at home. But it was a truly western-style store, with little interest to me as anything other than a landing zone. I wandered up to its second story, where I found discounted XBoxVCDs, and a coffee shop so grossly plastered with Windows Vista branding that they even had a "Windows Logo" menu prouding selling "Windows Vista WOWffee". Naturally, I ordered one due to the sheer absurdity of getting a free "Vista Wristlet", a white rubber bracelet emblazoned with the words "Windows Vista. The "Wow" starts here." To make it even more stomach-turning, it was a latte with orange flavoring. Delicious.Of course I couldn't let the day end with a "WOWffee" and high-quality merchandise at low, low prices, so I called a fellow Sunny from the hotel to join me for a very satisfactory dinner. And then, after consuming excessive amounts of vegetable biriyani, chicken tikka masala, and garlic naan, I returned to the "green zone".So what have I learned from my excursion?Exploring the poor districts of an unknown city alone can be frightening, but it certainly gives one perspective on the meaningless nonsense we labor over in the western world.Don't wait for someone to show you the world; just go see it yourself.The world is disappearing...so you better see it soon.I hope I can return to Hyderabad some day to see more of its hidden treasures. For now, I move on to the next JRuby World Tour Stop: BANGALORE. [Less]

I just completed my talk at Tech Days Hyderabad, and I think it was resounding success. If I heard right, the total head count for my "JRuby Essentials" talk was over 1200 people, by far the largest crowd I've presented for. There was a hoard of ... [More] questioners immediately after the talk, who followed me into the hall to keep asking. I gave out my entire in-pocket batch of business cards, and even received a round of applause after the JRuby on Rails demo. All this even after my talk was delayed and cut to 40 minutes because the earlier talks ran too long. It was a sprint, but I think it went very well.I will be posting the slides, but they're basically the same content many of you have probably seen the past couple months. For those who haven't had the pleasure, we'll start posting slides more regularly, and I'll try to blog a few example walkthroughs for those of you who want to duplicate them for your own talks. Feel free to steal it all and spread the word. [Less]

Success! It is now 3:00AM in Hyderabad India, and I have checked into the Novotel in HiTec City. The flight was uneventful; I got my demos basically working and then slept the majority of the time. The immigration and customs at the airport were ... [More] perhaps the least threatening of any I've seen. Immigrations basically just looked for my visa, took my arrival card, and stamped my passport. Customs was little more than a big white X-ray machine with "CUSTOMS" printed on a white piece of paper taped to the front.The smooth arrival was just what the doctor ordered. The reason I'm on this round-the-globe trip is because my original tickets to India were issued to the wrong name: Charles O'Nutter instead of Charles (O) Nutter. I never noticed the slip-up on the itinerary (nor would I ever have recognized it as a slip-up, since the output was pretty mainframe-ish), and only upon arriving at the airport in Minneapolis was I told I could not check in. Twenty-four hours and a lot of scrambling later, I had new tickets issued on the only flights available, hence my return trip heading east via Bangkok and Tokyo. But aside from that initial snafu, the trip has been pretty routine. Saturday will be interesting...my ticket to Bangalore has to be purchased in-person, so there's great potential for more headaches. But I can take it in stride, and I'm sure things will work out well in the end.Hyderabad is about what I expected, and I'm looking forward to getting into the city one of these three days before I leave for Bangalore. It feels very similar to Beijing, with old meeting new and construction everywhere. The city looks very appealing; street-level shops line almost every sidewalk, there's green plant life everywhere, and everything has sort of a dusty, dingy, comfortable feel. It's not dirty, don't get me wrong...just dusty, like any city kicking earth into the air with a thousand construction projects might be. The auto-rickshaws (three-wheeled rickshaw-looking things with small engines) are pervasive; I can imagine that during the day they swarm and buzz like bees. They drive on the British side of the road, which isn't much of a surprise, really.It's really unfortunate when traveling to more exotic places like this that I have to check into a tidy, pristine western-style hotel. I'd rather stay in the midst of the city, where I can walk out the front door into daily Hyderabadian life. I doubt I'll be at the hotel for all three days of the conference...there's exploring to be done.If you're located in Hyderabad or Bangalore and might be able to show me around a day this week (Thursday or Friday for Hyderabad) or next Sunday or Tuesday (Bangalore) I'd appreciate it. I'm not put off by crowds of people, even if many don't speak my language, but knowing the hot spots for shopping and eating makes exploring a bit more productive.I give my presentation in just over 12 hours, so I'm going to try to settle in with a nice Kingfisher lager beer and relax. The conference schedule has things starting up in about 6 hours, so I should be fine for sleep and fairly well-delagged by then.On the plane, I managed to duplicate the rails-integration WARfile-based deployment of a simple webapp, but I was unable to get an embedded Derby DB to work with it. I'm sure it's a matter of permissions, connection pooling, and such. I may or may not have time to get that working by tomorrow, but if I demo the basic app working with WEBrick and then WAR it up and show the non-DB stuff working in GlassFish, I think the point will have been made. I must also keep reminding myself that my talk is only 50 minutes now. I can fill 50 minutes without batting an eye. So we'll see if there's even time to get to GlassFish, since it eats up a good five minutes building and deploying the app from scratch. [Less]

I'm now relaxing at Schiphol Airport, where I've just plunked down my 10 euros for internet access. After a light breakfast, my current task is now to ensure demos are ready and working for TechDays. I discovered a bit ago that the Rails Integration ... [More] project uses maven to build, and so I need internet access for that first install command (to pull down required dependencies). I had worried a bit about finding internet access, but this connection appears to be pretty good. I've managed to build the Rails Integration module, and hopefully I'll be able to get Rails-in-a-WARfile working in the next few hours.If I discover anything interesting in the process, I'll post it. From what I've observed, the rails-integration guys and Ashish have had lots of success lately.If you happen to be at Schiphol before I depart at 11:55, I'm in Lounge 2 near the brasserie. I'm the one with the MacBook Pro, fighting jetlag and overlooking the concourse.The next stop will be Hyderabad. My 11:55 flight departs from gate F8.Update: I managed to get Rails up and running nicely in a WAR file. Huzzah! I'll play with it a bit on the plane and get our usual Rails demo to feed directly into "now we'll make it a WAR file". Thanks much to the rails-integration guys for putting together a really slick piece of work. Gotta love this whole open-source thing.Side note: jet lag is a weird feeling. Right now it's 9:49 in Amsterdam and around 14:19 in Hyderabad, so I have to pretend it's mid-afternoon. My flight will board in about two hours, and toward the end of the flight I'll have to pretend it's evening and start getting a little sleep. It's quite unfortunate that I'm arriving in Hyderabad at 1:20AM on the day I'm presenting, but that's how it goes! [Less]