S. Robert James wrote:
> I'm glad to hear that, Charlie.
> 
> My major point is about libraries: I think JRuby will open up a lot of
> the industrial strength libraries to Ruby.  My concern, though, is
> that JRuby will not focus on helping Rubyists do Ruby better, but
> rather help Rubyists talk with Java apps.  I'm glad to hear that your
> goals are larger than that.
> 
> I think the best - perhaps only - way to make something like this
> happen is to make interfaces, which are fully in the Ruby spirit and
> style - that harness Java's libs underneath.  Ruby style interfaces to
> SOAP, to XML processing, to network protocols, to message passing,
> etc. - with the elegance and succintness of Ruby, but powered by
> Java's industrial strength mettle.
> 
> What do you say?

Absolutely! This is exactly the right thinking. I don't want JRuby to 
become incompatible with Ruby any more than you all do, but there are a 
lot of great libraries to be harnessed on the Java platform. Finding a 
way to expose them for JRubyists while not diverging from the C Ruby 
world is going to be a great challenge holding great promise.

One great example of a way to potentially harness cross-impl 
capabilities would be a "good" GUI API that can be backed by a number of 
libraries. JRBuilder for JRuby takes a Swing-based approach, but the DSL 
it provides could probably be morphed into something more general purpose.

In general I think this is where the best cooperation is to be found, 
making common APIs that work across implementations, allowing migration, 
compatibility, and above all, a few solid standards everyone can follow. 
Rails works on both Ruby and JRuby. So do RubyGems, Rake, RSpec, and now 
I managed to get Mephisto working. But on JRuby they use different 
libraries and a different VM. These are the kinds of cross-impl, 
cross-platform success stories we should be focusing on for the future 
of Ruby.

- Charlie