Sun Java PCQuest developer conference

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month.

Dynamically-typed languages like Ruby are only beginning to be accepted in the software mainstream, and many of the best practices and tools remain to be invented. Sun would like to ensure that the Ruby programming language, in its JRuby form, is available to the community of Java developers. Also, there is a possibility that the Java platform may prove to be an attractive deployment option for existing Ruby applications in certain scenarios.

Acism's Java team attended the PCQuest Sun summit last week. I have a few impressions at fifty thousand feet level to share:

1. Sun is becoming even more open. Matt Thompson, Sr Director who looks after Sun's open source program gave a very balanced view. Sun is also releasing its JVM source code under open source licence.
2. Childish Microsoft-bashing was absent. Highly mature views were presented about Sun's strategy of living in the world as it is. This will take Java a long way.