Engine Yard (EY) is a enterpricy (serious support and hosting, but pricy) Rails hosting service.  Two months ago at the JavaOne, Engine Yard announced that they will support JRuby. Since then a lot changed, Oracle bought Sun which raised a lot of questions about Sun’s products and frankly I don’t think it looks good for a couple of products. The endangered product list so far: NetBeans, MySQL, JavaFX (despite Larry Ellison commitment), Solaris, and side products like JRuby. Due to some legal reasons, all this is just speculation and no official announcements have been made yet. However, this uncertainty doesn’t help and so many developers and Sun employees are worried. As a consequence of this uncertainty, the JRuby guys left Sun (Oracle) and joined Engine Yard. Charles Nutter, one of the JRuby guys, said: “To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn’t support JRuby, but we also didn’t have any evidence that they would. Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision.”

I consider this very good news. Engine Yard has always been a very strong force behind Ruby and Rails. They already employ a bunch of very good developers and now they got themselves a bunch of geniuses more. This not only means that JRuby future looks bright, no, it is shining. Thanks JRuby guys and Engine Yard!

As a side note, Nick Sieger is leaving Project Kenai (another product with an uncertain future I guess) and returning to JRuby full time. Ola Bini is still working on JRuby at ThoughtWorks.

Source:

Sun’s JRuby team jumps ship to Engine Yard

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