Among my friends, it’s not a secret that I personally don’t like Java. During my time at the university, I had to deal with it for some courses, but somehow nobody could convince me to really like the language. With Ruby, it was the exact opposite – I saw a few code examples, read some articles about it and I immediately started to like the language and its charming way of doing OO like I always wanted it to be.

When I discovered JRuby, I therefore didn’t take it serious and overlooked its potential. Today, I’m starting to like JRuby. Why? Because JRuby is actually pretty cool. It runs code of my favorite language (Ruby) on a wide-spread and highly optimized platform (the Java Virtual Machine, aka JVM). You can use JRuby to run Ruby code without even knowing a single bit about Java – but it runs on the JVM (which has several advantages as stated below).