Cenqua: here I come 1

Posted by Michael Studman Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:29:59 GMT

The rumours are true, come the new year I’ll be starting with Cenqua - the creators of Fisheye, Clover & Crucible. I’ll be working remotely for them from my little corner of north London or to put it another way, I’ll be their premier UK employee. ;) My task will be to design, develop and support new and existing software development tools you will actually use.

This move has been a long time in the making - I first interviewed with them (a beer in hand, if I recall) back in the middle of the dot-com crash when they were transitioning from a service company to a product company. Unfortunately, like many, they’d just laid off staff and weren’t in a position to take me on. More recently this year I did some work for them but found my 9-5 racket was proving too exhausting to deliver anything substantial or on-time. Now the timing seems right for me to come on board full time.

You gotta love a company that calls its head office the “Central Command” and describes my role as “Senior Software Engineer / Architect / Code Poet”.

Matt, Conor, Brendan and Pete - thanks for giving me the chance to work on some great products! I can’t wait!

RSpec on JRuby - an interview 1

Posted by Michael Studman Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:50:00 GMT

Last month Charles Nutter, Aslak Hellesoy and myself were all interviewed by Pat Eyler on getting RSpec framework working on JRuby. This was quite a milestone for the project and Pat thought it deserved a bit of publicity. It also came at a time when my current employer issued the “thou shalt only use Java” edict so you might detect a bit of emotion in some of my responses.

The version that made it onto InfoQ provides some nice soundbites and the full interview is well worth the read. Enjoy!

JRuby 0.9.2 out - get it while it's hot!

Posted by Michael Studman Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:27:03 GMT

The JRuby trio have just released version 0.9.2 of everyone’s** favourite scripting language for the JVM.

New and notable in this release:

  • Extensions openssl and readline now working
  • Code for a new graphical irb console
  • Partial support for iconv and bigdecimal extensions
  • RSpec now supported
  • Improved Rails support
  • Fixed all known block and scoping bugs
  • Enhanced parser performance
  • More compiler and performance work
  • Refactored variable scoping logic
  • 127 Jira issues resolved since 0.9.1

My modest contribution to this release included:

  • Getting RSpec supported
  • Implementing the Enumerable::Enumerator class and associated Kernel methods
  • Fixing the Java::clazz.naming.Binding syntax implementation to properly work
  • Fixes for visibility issues with some Kernel methods

So go and download it now! What are you waiting for?

** Favourite to all but those nice Groovy folk, oh and those BSH and Javascript/Rhino wierdos