JRuby 1.6: Now With Win32OLE Goodness

JRuby 1.6 has just been released and, among the many new features, the JRuby installer for Windows now includes the win32ole library.

This is good news for those of us that frequently use Ruby's win32ole module to automate Excel, Word, and a variety of other Windows applications and processes. Now you have the option of running your code on the JVM.

And running on the JVM opens up a world of possibilities. You could, for example, whip up a Swing GUI via Monkeybars, and use Rawr to package it up as an EXE file for ease of distribution.

Interested? Download JRuby 1.6 at jruby.org, take the win32ole module for a drive around the block, and let me know if you hit any potholes.

Coming Soon: win32ole for JRuby

FYI: In a recent Ruby Forum thread, Charles Nutter wrote:

FWIW, a win32ole library is in development and should be in JRuby for 1.6.

This is good news for those of us who do a lot of work with the standard Ruby win32ole library.

My sincere thanks to all who are helping to make this happen.

Win32OLE Library for JRuby?

Charles O. Nutter of the JRuby project is seeking proposals for Google's Summer of Code (GSoC).

Among the suggested projects is this one of possible interest to many [J]Ruby on Windows users:

Win32OLE Library for JRuby - Implement the win32ole library for JRuby. This would also be an excellent contribution, since there's already libraries like Jacob to take some of the pain out of it, and it would be great to have it working on JRuby. (suggested by sgwong)

Update from Charlie:

BTW, if you know anyone that might be interested in doing this through GSoC, please spread the word quickly. The deadline for submissions is Monday, April 7, so there's not a lot of time left.

And to make it more attractive, there's already a very nice Java library that provides COM/OLE support (http://danadler.com/jacob/) so the task is more about wiring that library into JRuby than mucking about with any low-level native nasties.

I'd love to see this project undertaken, as it could be a big boost for those of us who currently do COM automation work with Ruby. I haven't done much with JRuby yet (a wee bit of Jython in the past), but I like the possibilities for having an easily-distributable app (JAR file?) that includes a GUI (e.g., Swing) and Win32OLE functionality.

What do you think? Would a Win32OLE library increase the likelihood of you using JRuby for some future projects?