JVM: JRuby's advantages over Clojure and Scala

Don't get me wrong, since using Clojure and Scala quite a lot over the last month, I very much like both languages. If I were to do a very large project from scratch, I would likely choose Scala (love the concise syntax). Clojure's interop with Java is great and Clojure is a nice language to code in. Both languages have helpful communities behind them.

All that said, I saw two things this morning that convinced me that JRuby has a real advantage because it combines the rich Java and Rails infrastructures. These two cool things were:
  • Using Datamapper with two different back end stores (MySQL and MongoDB) - architectually pleasing!
  • The Neo4j + Lucene JRuby wrapper that provides a very "Ruby like" interface for the Neo4j graph database with seemless indexing/search support using Lucene (I just did something similar wrapping Lucene and Sesame (RDF data store)).

Comments

  1. Charles Oliver Nutter2:21 PM

    I think this boils down to "Ruby has been around longer". The Ruby community has been coming up with innovative, inspirational solutions to software dev challenges for a much longer time than the other languages' communities, so there's a wealth of Really Cool Stuff out there. Our challenge on the JRuby team is to bring that Cool Stuff to the Java platform in the best way possible (and to show people how cool it actually is) :)

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