How come the “Platform Independent” section of “Why JRuby” on the
JRuby.org home page doesn’t mention “easy to distribute”?
One of the greatest weaknesses of MRI Ruby has been the
near-impossibility of developing a Ruby program that could be downloaded
and used by “Aunt Bertha” who knows nothing about Ruby, gems, RVM etc
and has no interest in learning them. For all practical purposes if you
write a program in MRI Ruby you can only distribute copies of it to
other Ruby geeks - and probably only if they use the same sort of
computer as you do.
JRuby, on the other hand, makes it trivially simple to develop an
application that you can distribute with no external dependencies apart
from the JVM - build your program, write a short shell script (or batch
file) to start it with a double-click, zip it all into a .zip or .tar.gz
and distribute it.
Not only is any reference to this ability missing from the JRuby
home-page, I can find nothing about it on the supporting pages either.
Why is JRuby so badly undersold?
Must it always be in MRI Ruby’s shadow?