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Background: I'm writing a 'standard' (nothing special) web application in Ruby (not Rails) and I need to start thinking about deployment.
So I've been hearing a lot of recommendations to use JRuby to deploy Ruby web applications, regardless of whether you actually need Java libraries or not. How true is this? Is it worth using the Java implementation just for speed? Would I gain anything else by doing so? Would I run into any issues?
PS: I don't know Java that well, so "you can write parts of it in Java" isn't very helpful.
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If you are using an application that will stay alive for long, and you want better runtime support, JRuby can be a great way to go. Otherwise, you can safely wait until you need these things to actually make the move (it is likely to go smoothly). Excellent answer, that's exactly what I needed to know.
JRuby is similar to the standard Ruby interpreter except written in Java. JRuby features some of the same concepts, including object-oriented programming, and dynamic typing as Ruby. The key difference is that JRuby is tightly integrated with Java, and can be called directly from Java programs.
In development, you can run your Rails application using the jRuby platform like your usual rails server (do not forget to set the default ruby to jRuby).
JRuby is a JavaTM implementation of the Ruby interpreter. While retaining many of the popular characteristics of Ruby, such as dynamic-typing, JRuby is integrated with the Java platform.
JRuby is one of the most complete ruby implementations (there are a lot other ones out there such as IronRuby, Maglev, Rubinius, XRuby, YARV, MacRuby). It is very comprehensive, therefore, unless you use gems that use native C code, you will very very likely be just fine compatibility-wise.
JRuby is a bit faster than the actual C implementation, but it supports actual threads, whereas the official implementation is struggling a bit into getting it (it still uses Green Threads). Using Java threads from JRuby is quite trivial, even though it will require you to couple your code with Java (with a little DI, this coupling will only happen once, though).
Another benefit: runtime tools. Java, as a platform, instead of a language, has a lot of runtime tools to help you diagnose problems and check the state of the application (profilers, JConsole, and so on).
Twitter engineers also mentioned that the Ruby VM kinda has trouble being an environment for long lived processes, while the JVM is very good at that, because it’s been optimized for that over the last ten years.
Ruby also had a little security issue recently, which did not affect JRuby's implementation.
On the other hand, your project requires more artifacts (JVM, JRuby jars, etc). If you are using an application that will stay alive for long, and you want better runtime support, JRuby can be a great way to go. Otherwise, you can safely wait until you need these things to actually make the move (it is likely to go smoothly).
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