14 DAY TRIAL // The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle seems to have not gone as planned. One of the most successful development teams put together by Sun disintegrated into thin air last week. In what is the coup of the year, until now, three out of the four members working on JRuby, an implementation of the Ruby programming language in Java, have left to go pursuit a career with EngineYard.
Unfortunately for Sun, or let's start saying Oracle from now, the developers will be working on the same project at a company even more committed to this than Sun might have ever been from the beginning.
EngineYard is the world leader in Ruby on Rails development, being very interested and supporting any Ruby-implementation project. According to one of the JRuby developers, it seems like EngineYard went head-hunting, capitalizing on the uncertain environment at Sun, after no news or directions were communicated to the JRuby Team from the Oracle acquisition.
In a statement for IDG, Charles Nutter, JRuby developer, had this to say: “Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision.” Asked about Oracle and their future plans, he said that, “To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn't support JRuby, but we also didn't have any evidence that they would.”
It seems the one to blame in this whole blunder is Oracle's management that made a huge, rookie mistake by not issuing any assurances or future plans for Sun's employees. The three developers that left Sun are Charles Nutter, Nick Sieger and Thomas Enebo.
EngineYard seems to be after the money in this whole move, since JRuby is a more fit solution to large enterprises that are running Java in many applications, but would like to capitalize from using a dynamic programming language on the side. And, since Ruby, with its Ruby on Rails implementation, looks like the hottest thing right now, EngineYard didn't waste any time in upgrading its development team.
On a blog post for EngineYard, Charles Nutter had the following to say about future development directions at EngineYard: “[...] In order for Rails to penetrate the large organizations of the world, many of which run Java in some form, JRuby is often the answer. So out of JRuby, Engine Yard and the Ruby community get a broad new landscape of opportunities.“
The next release for JRuby (1.4) is expected to come out under EngineYard in a couple of months.