Things

(This is the preliminary home of JRuby Sketchpad, a frontend for the fantastic JRuby ruby interpreter.)

JRuby?
JRuby is an interpreter for the easy-to-learn yet powerful programming language Ruby completely written in Java. It offers, apart from a platform independent binary, fancy JVM optimization features for Ruby and interoperability with Java (you can use any Java library in your Ruby code, for example), among other things.

Sketchpad?
This application is basically a syntax-highlighting editor with all the basic features (missing one? tell me) strapped onto a JRuby binary. It’s supposed to provide a portable (between OSes and USB-key-portable) simplistic tool for writing and running Ruby scripts where Ruby isn’t installed and writing scripts that use some Java library or implements its GUI via Swing.

Download:
Since the included libraries make up most of the download size, I’ve separated them from the rest. Put the lib directory in the same directory Sketchpad.jar is in, then it should work.

Download JRuby Sketchpad 0.0.0.4 sans libs
Download the missing libs

Screenshot:
(v0.0.0.4)

Current version:
The current version is 0.0.0.4, which like all builds under this naming scheme is still flaky and heavily in development. Expect stuff to be broken and probably even to break other stuff.
If you’d like to give it a try, please let me know of any issues or suggestions via the comment form below or via email to felix at the right part of the url up there (include ‘sketchpad’ in the message title or your message will get lost.)

Licensing / Source:
Hasn’t been decided yet. Don’t have all that much time to work on code at the moment and I’d rather spend it in Eclipse. It’ll probably end up under GPL though. You can have a look at the source if you ask nicely.

Requirements:
Java RE 1.6, that’s all.

public class Main {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		System.out.println("Hi World!");
	}
}

Und so.