The next major version of the JRuby Java implementation of the open source Ruby programming language is almost fully baked and ready to come out of the oven. Now at release candidate stage, JRuby 1.6 is said to be more closely aligned to Microsoft Windows from a compatibility perspective.
Speaking to InternetNews.com, JRuby project lead Thomas Enebo has said that, "From JRuby 1.5 to 1.6 there have been over 1,900 commits and we've made a lot of changes, primarily around adding solid Ruby 1.9.2 support. With JRuby 1.6, we can now run in Ruby 1.8.7 or in 1.9.2 mode."
In the Java arena itself, JRuby 1.6 will grab hold of (or leverage if you prefer) Apache Maven artifacts to provide functionality from this project management and build automation software tool.
As well as process of "dogfooding" on Windows to bring JRuby closer to Microsoft's OS, further improvements have been made to handle the many multi-lingualization functions in Ruby 1.9, to makes it easier to deal with many encodings that exist and help with the normalization process.
