The core team behind JRuby is leaving Sun and joining Engine Yard, a move tied to uncertainty after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. A Sun spokesperson confirmed the change.
About two and a half years earlier, Sun had brought in Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo—the pair widely known as the “JRuby Guys”—to focus on making Ruby run on the Java Virtual Machine. Sun later added Nick Sieger to the effort. All three were set to start at their new company the following Monday.
Their concern was straightforward: Oracle might not continue backing work on Ruby for the JVM, while JRuby remained central to their long-term plans.
Engine Yard, based in San Francisco and only two years old at the time, built its business around helping Ruby on Rails developers handle deployment and operations. The company supported application hosting through cloud computing and third-party data centers. It had raised $15 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and Amazon.com, and was already pursuing Rails-related work on cloud platforms.
According to Engine Yard’s vice president of marketing, Michael Mullany, the company hired the JRuby team because JRuby adoption was growing and Engine Yard lacked deep in-house expertise in that area. He said JRuby had grown by 40 percent over the previous year. He also described the next phase for JRuby as a professionally run open-source project, with paid support offered alongside it.
Nick Sieger, who had been the leader of Sun’s Kenai project, said the next generation of JRuby would let developers host applications in the cloud in a way comparable to SourceForge.
A fourth core JRuby developer, Ola Bini, had already left earlier and remained at ThoughtWorks, which hired him the previous year.
Nutter said the next JRuby release would be version 1.4, scheduled for September that year. The goal for that release was to make JRuby a first-class citizen on the JVM and, in his view, the best language available on that platform. At the same time, the team would also be working on items connected to Engine Yard.