ActiveRuby, a commercially supported Ruby distribution is now available as a beta version from ActiveState as part of its push to expand the portfolio of languages for which it provides support.

We reported last November on ActiveState's intention to add Ruby, along with Node.js and Go to the existing range of languages (Perl, Python and Tcl) for which it provides commercial support, indemnification, additional operating system support and more.

ActiveRuby is based on Ruby version 2.3.4, and according to the developers provides out-of-the-box easy installation, development and deployment of Ruby applications. Ruby 2.3.4 was the version released in March this year. Ruby 2.3 added support for the frozen string literal pragma,improving the overall performance because Ruby has to allocate fewer objects.

Ruby 2.3 also added a safe navigation operator, also known as a lonely operator. The &. operator already exists in C#, Groovy, and Swift, and in Ruby will make it easier to handle nils.

The 2.3.x versions of Ruby are also faster than previous versions, thanks to improvements including machine code level tuning for object allocation and method calling code, a smarter instance variable data structure,a reconsider method entry data structure, and an introducing new table data structure.

ActiveRuby includes over 40 of the most popular gems and frameworks, including Rails and Sinatra. It also offers installation and management of Ruby on Windows. The developers say that the intention is to make it easy for enterprise developers to adopt Ruby internally to host web applications behind the firewall. Jeff Rouse, Director of Product Management, ActiveState, said that the company has

"focused on easing the gem management and Windows installation pains, and inclusion of the best non-GPL license gems."

Gems precompiled in ActiveRuby include all the major libraries for database connectors including MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Redis, and MySQL; testing with Cucumber and simplecov for code coverage; and cloud deployment and integrations with AWS.

ActiveRuby Beta is currently available for Windows and will be available for Linux and MacOS later in 2017. For each language distribution ActiveState makes available there are Business and Enterprise editions, and there is always a free Community edition. The same will be true for ActiveRuby.

Developers can download the Beta and submit feedback and suggestions for a chance to win an ActiveState t-shirt.

More Information

ActiveRuby site

ActiveState

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