I came across “an interesting message”:http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/83839 on the ruby talk mailing list a month ago. “Second Life”:http://secondlife.com/ is a 3d, online virtual world with no specific purpose. I heard about it from a good friend that was planning a business within it, selling virtual goods and services (the game lets you exchange real money for “Linden dollars”.) Although the concept appealed to me, I was never interested in it enough to install it and give it a try.

I had also heard of the “recent hiring”:http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/09/jruby-steps-into-sun.html of JRuby developers (Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo) by Sun. I knew that “JRuby”:http://jruby.org/ was some sort of Ruby integration with Java (like Jython), and was happy as a Rails developer that Sun was giving Ruby some love. But again, I was satisfied with Rails enough to not dig deeper into it.

I love web development and try to stay in touch with local scenes such as the “Orlando Ruby Users Group”:http://www.orug.org/ , “Refresh Orlando”:http://www.refreshorlando.org/ , the upcoming “Refresh06 conference”:http://refresh06.com/ , and have attended “BarCamp Jacksonville”:http://barcamp.org/BarCampJacksonville and “Refresh Jacksonville”:http://www.refreshjacksonville.org/ in the past. Needless to say, being able to meet up with a virtual locality of “Rubyists of Second Life”:http://rosl.iandb.net/ AND learn about JRuby seemed like an amazing opportunity to indulge in the kind of fun that makes the internet so great.

“[click here to see all the screenshots I took]”:http://flickr.com/photos/larrytheliquid/sets/72157594350925388/ !

@On my trips to the meeting before it started, in my Eastern time zone, I had fun playing with interactive billboards that had pages like the RoR website, some Ruby sites, etc. The coolest thing was this little red cube on the middle of the giant ruby…it was a module that let you use IRB in Second Life! That’s right, IRB right there in the game…so cool.@

Then came the presentation, a format I found to be very entertaining. Headius started off the projector with some introductory slides, to the sweet tunes of Daft Punk that someone in the audience was streaming. You could see his avatar move his eyes and body to change slides, look around at people, and gestures were performed during chat to make the whole thing eerily lifelike. As you can see in the “presentation and chat log”:http://rosl.iandb.net/presentations/jruby/JRuby%20Presentation%2018%20Oct%2006.html , discussion during and between slides ensued…the air was electric and the format for this kind of meeting definitely works.

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So to sum this all up, Second Life is a fun and exciting presentation medium. I encourage anyone interested enough in Ruby to read this article, to join the Rubyists of Second Life group (refer to “install and setup instructions here”:http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/83839 .) JRuby has great and friendly developers that have that oh-so-good open source concern for community needs, and now has the backing of Sun. Anything that gives the dark side of Rails (deployment) another alternative is fantastic in my book, and access to probably the best libraries ever (Java’s) is also very sweet. Plus…possible better performance…sign me up! I’ll definitely be playing with JRuby, and am glad to have found out more about something I initially neglected. And finally, in case anyone cared, my in-game name is “Liquid Lunardi”.