JRuby Cookbook

Chapter 8. The JRuby Community

Introduction

This final chapter includes a series of recipes about how to participate in the JRuby community. First, we will look at building JRuby from source, something that most developers looking to peek under the covers of JRuby will need to do at some point. We will also do a quick walkthrough of JRuby’s issue management system before finishing up with some information about the ways in which JRuby community members communicate with each other.

Building JRuby from Source

Problem

You need to build JRuby from the source files. This could be to take advantage of some unreleased code or to create a JRuby JAR file for distribution.

Solution

Download the source using a Subversion client:

$ svn co http://svn.codehaus.org/jruby/trunk/jruby/

JRuby is built using Apache Ant. There are a number of useful Ant targets in the provided build script:

jar

Creates the jruby.jar file.

jar-complete

Creates the jruby-complete.jar file, which includes all of the contents from jruby.jar and all of the Ruby standard libraries.

test

Runs the JRuby unit test suite.

dist-bin

Creates the JRuby binary distribution, i.e., the ZIP file that you download from http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/.

Discussion

The Subversion command above will check out the most recent version of the source code (the trunk) from the JRuby repository. However, some times it is necessary to check out the source core that corresponds to a release. This can be done by checking out one of the tags under http://svn.codehaus.org/jruby/tags/ ...