<p>The Java platform has largely catered to the needs of the Java language and Java developers. Its APIs are tailored to a JVM-centric view of the world, where Strings are always UTF-16, languages are static, and native libraries do not exist. But a majority of developers do not live in this world. They live in a world of variable string encodings. A world where dynamic languages work side-by-side with static languages. A world of heterogeneity, where every application combines libraries written in many different languages: sometimes native, sometimes interpreted.</p>

<p>JRuby is an implementation of Ruby for the JVM, but it's much more than simply an alternative JVM language. Ruby has its own community, its own standard implementation, and its own expectations about how a language runtime should interoperate with the system. Because of this, JRuby more than any other JVM language implementation has stretched the capabilities of the JVM in unexpected ways.</p>

<p>In this talk we'll explore the many libraries written specifically for JRuby, to support strings with encodings other than UTF-16, C library calls without writing C code, fast libc-like buffered IO directly atop NIO, and much more. We'll discuss how JRuby shows the JVM and the Java platform can do a lot more than just run Java applications. And we'll look at how the JVM and Java platform can and must evolve in the future to support these new and unusual combinations of technologies.</p>