JRuby and Java

If you are using JRuby you can access Java functionality in your Ruby code pretty easily. Two possible reasons to do this are to create an involved user interface (for simple GUIs the Shoes toolkit is excellent, but it is somewhat limited), and to create images on-the-fly for your Rails application (RMagick offers an alternative, but cannot be used with Tomcat, which requires JRuby). I may be posting on both these later, but first, I want to explore the basics of using Java from Ruby.

I am using NetBeans, which has a particular file structure for projects, and also makes the creation of a JAR file very easy (just press F11 and the main project gets built and compressed into a JAR file inside the dist folder). For testing purposes, I created a project called JavaForRuby (and so a package name javaforruby), with a simple test class, TestObject, which has two instance variables, with setters and getters, and a static method, getStatus, which returns a String object.

And so to the Ruby side. You need to be running JRuby, of course. I had some problems getting my Java classes to work, and this seemed to be resolved by using a more recent version of JRuby (1.3.0RC1), though I am sure it should work with older versions.

The first thing to do is introduce Java to Ruby, then you need to get your JAR linked up, and then your class loaded. Once that is done, the class can be accessed:

include Java

require "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/../../JavaForRuby/dist/javaforruby.jar"

include_class "javaforruby.TestObject"

p TestObject.getStatus

Creating and using an instance of a Java object is simple:

tobj = TestObject.new 'My Tester', 5
p tobj.class      # => Java::Javaforruby::TestObject
p tobj.java_class # => class javaforruby.TestObject
p tobj.get_name   # => "class javaforruby.TestObject"My Tester"
p tobj.get_value  # => 5
tobj.set_name 'My Renamed Tester'
p tobj.get_name   # => "My Renamed Tester"

Note that I used the conventions of Java to define the object, but the conventions of Ruby to access it from Ruby; JRuby has associated get_name in Ruby with getName() in Java.

Let us try using an array. JRuby adds a to_java method to Array, and this takes a single parameter, the class of the objects for the array.

ja = %w(one two three).to_java :string
p ja.java_class     # => [Ljava.lang.String;
p ja[0]             # => "one"
p ja[0].class       # => String
ja.each { |e| p e } # => "one"
                   "two"
                   "three"

What happens if you do not tell it the object type? Well, the each method still works the same; the system works out what each object is. Accessing elements by their index is not so good (I did wonder if fetch might work, but throws an NoMethodError exception).

ja = %w(one two three).to_java
p ja.java_class     # => [Ljava.lang.Object;
p ja[0]             # => #<Java::JavaLang::String:0x155d3a3 @java_object=#<Java::JavaObject:0x57e787>>
p ja[0].class       # => "Java::JavaLang::String
ja.each { |e| p e } # => "one"
                   "two"
                   "three"

We can combine the array and the custom class to make a Java array of Java objects in Ruby.

toja = [
TestObject.new('My First Tester', 5),
TestObject.new('Second', 93),
TestObject.new('Last Tester', 42),
].to_java

toja.each { |e| p e.get_name }

Hashes are no problem either.

hash = {:name => 'Fred', :age => 27}
java_hash = java.util.HashMap.new(hash)
p java_hash.get :name  # => "Fred"

Rather than using the full path name in the method call, you can import each class. You should be able to import a complete package, though I could not get it to work with JRuby 1.3.0RC1 (but I could with 1.1.6).

java_import "java.util.HashMap"
# import "java.util"
# include_package "java.util"

hash = {:name => 'Fred', :age => 27}
java_hash = HashMap.new(hash)
p java_hash.get :name

You can use import rather than java_import, and many tutorials indeed do this. However, import conflicts with Rake, and so, although your system will work as expected, your tests will fail with a NameError and complaints about a 'const_missing' (thanks to Charles Oliver for pointing this out).

Also, I had a problem with import java.io.File. Ruby warns that the constant File already exists ("warning: already initialized constant File"), and I think that this gets overwritten, and the code that is expecting the original value gets very confused... You need to restart your web server after that. Again, java_import seems to fix this.

See also:
http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/Calling_Java_from_JRuby

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