JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top rated speakers from the JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers who through conference surveys recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized.

We spoke with distinguished Rock Star, Charles Nutter.

A JRuby Update from Charles Nutter

Charles Nutter of Red Hat is well known as a lead developer of JRuby, a Ruby implementation of Java that is tightly integrated with Java to allow for the embedding of the interpreter into any Java application with full two-way access between the Java and the Ruby code.

Nutter is giving the following sessions at this year’s JavaOne:

• CON7257 – “JVM Bytecode for Dummies (and the Rest of Us Too)”
• CON7284 – “Implementing Ruby: The Long, Hard Road”
• CON7263 – “JVM JIT for Dummies”
• BOF6682 – “I’ve Got 99 Languages, but Java Ain’t One”
  
• CON6575 – “Polyglot for Dummies” (Both with Thomas Enebo)

I asked Nutter, to give us the latest on JRuby. “JRuby seems to have hit a tipping point this past year,” he explained, “moving from ‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability, reliability, security, and a number of other features important for today's applications. We're currently wrapping up JRuby 1.7, which improves support for Ruby 1.9 APIs, solves a number of user issues and concurrency challenges, and utilizes invokedynamic to outperform all other Ruby implementations by a wide margin. JRuby just gets better and better.”

When asked what he thought about the rapid growth of alternative languages for the JVM, he replied, “I'm very intrigued by efforts to bring a high-performance JavaScript runtime to the JVM. There's really no reason the JVM couldn't be the fastest platform for running JavaScript with the right implementation, and I'm excited to see that happen.”

And what is Nutter working on currently? “Aside from JRuby 1.7 wrap-up,” he explained, “I'm helping the Hotspot developers investigate invokedynamic performance issues and test-driving their new invokedynamic code in Java 8. I'm also starting to explore ways to improve the general state of dynamic languages on the JVM using JRuby as a guide, and to help the JVM become a better platform for all kinds of languages.”

Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

A new article, now up on otn/java, titled “The 2012 JAX Innovation Awards” reports on  important Java developments celebrated by the Awards, which were announced in July of 2012. The Awards, given by S&S Media Group, aim to, "Reward those technologies, companies, organizations and individuals that make outstanding contributions to Java." The Awards fall into three categories: Most Innovative Java Technology, Most Innovative Java Company, and Top Java Ambassador. In addition, a finalist who did not win an award receives a Special Jury prize, "in acknowledgement of their unique contribution and positive impact on the Java ecosystem."

The winners were: JetBrains for Most Innovative Java Company; Adam Bien as Top Java Ambassador; Restructure 101, created by Headway Software, as Most Innovative Technology; and Charles Nutter, Special Jury award. Each winner received a $2,500 prize. The five finalists in each category were invited to attend the JAX Conference in San Francisco, California. This year's winners each received a $2,500 prize.

JetBrains Fellow, Ann Oreshnikova, listed her favorite JetBrains innovations:

* Nullability annotations and nullability checker
* CamelCase navigation and completion
* Continuous Integration in grid (on multiple agents), in TeamCity
* IntelliJ Platform and its language support framework
* MPS language workbench
* Kotlin programming language

When asked what currently excites him about Java, Adam Bien, winner of the Java Ambassador Award, expressed enthusiasm over the increasing interest of smaller companies and startups for Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” he said. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.”

Special Jury Prize Winner, Charles Nutter of Red Hat, remarked that, “JRuby seems to have hit a tipping point this past year, moving from ‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability, reliability, security, and a number of other features important for today's applications.

Check out the complete article here.