Sessions at JRubyConf 2011 on Wednesday 3rd August

JRuby's a year older, and a lot's happened this year. We fixed record numbers of bugs and introduced C extensions and 1.9 support in the JRuby 1.6.x series. We've started integrating Java 7's invokedynamic throughout JRuby. And we're seeing new users faster than ever before, coming from both the Ruby and Java worlds. This talk will update you on JRuby development over the past year, and lay out some rough plans for the year to come.

Hear the story of a JRuby project approaching its completion date from a Java veteran who turned to Ruby for its power and elegance. Find out why JRuby was chosen for some parts of the project and not for others. What were our greatest pain points? How long did the project take? Why was management willing to take on the risk of a new technology? This talk is geared for the IT team just starting out with JRuby who wants to be better prepared for the journey ahead.

This talk will cover JRuby integration with Java and running Rails in the JVM, concluding with the port of a simple Struts / Hibernate app to Rails. The audience should leave with all the knowledge necessary to port their own applications to Rails.

The ubiquity of Java is a testament to the language's design: platform independent object-oriented programming with garbage collection, native multi-threading, process security and static typing. But is it the best language for programming modern web applications? Creating impactful social experiences for users involves a constant process of designing, redesigning and testing the interface. When you write up and tear down code on a daily basis, it helps to have a concise, dynamic and full-featured language like Ruby to evolve a website. But bringing Ruby to an already existing development and operational infrastructure based on Java is not easy. It's far easier to bring the JVM to the Ruby and that's what JRuby can do; this talk will cover how we integrated JRuby into a pre-existing Java MVC framework to rapidly iterate on and deliver new experiences to our users.

This talk will introduce you to TorqueBox and why you should consider it for your next JRuby application. We'll cover TorqueBox features -messaging, scheduled jobs, asynchronous tasks, and services - then show how they can save you time and effort during development and deployment. We'll also show how you can use dependency injection in Ruby to integrate with existing Java components in a way no other JRuby server can.

The Semantic Web is changing the way we communicate and share data on the internet and holds the key to exciting new innovations. Come and discover what the Semantic Web is and it's many benefits. We'll learn about some of the technologies that enable the Semantic Web (RDF/ SPARQL) and take a look at using the power of JRuby to access Jena, a prominent Java Open Source Semantic Web Framework, to do some practical examples.

As developers, we love order. When systems are orderly, they are easy to understand and maintain. But, if that's the case, shouldn't our systems be neat, symmetric, nice and orderly? After all, we are in control -- we write the code. In this keynote, Michael Feathers will talk about how we need to change our expectations of software design, learning how to guide code's growth rather than trying to dictate it.