Engine Yard has announced that JRuby core team members Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter are leaving the company to join Red Hat in an apparently friendly deal between the two firms. According to Red Hat's Mark Little, bringing the two developers to the company "has been almost 2 years in the making". In addition to JRuby, they will be working with various teams within JBoss and Red Hat on projects such as TorqueBox, Immutant and OpenJDK. Nutter commented on Twitter saying "I feel like this is my opportunity to really start contributing to OpenJDK rather than just evangelizing".

As part of the partnership with Red Hat, Bill Platt, Engine Yard VP of Worldwide Customer Service, says that the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider will continue to work with the core team to develop the Ruby implementation for the Java Virtual Machine. They will also collaborate on features to support Engine Yard customers running on the company's cloud.

"This is a great opportunity to add more resources for JRuby and continue the important work that has been accomplished," said Platt, adding that, "We look forward to working with Red Hat and continuing to collaborate with Charles and Tom on advancing JRuby". Enebo and Nutter left Sun Microsystems in 2009 – where they had worked on JRuby since 2006 – to join Engine Yard following concerns over Oracle's post-acquisition plans for Sun.

In other news, at this year's JRubyConf event currently taking place in Minneapolis, the JRuby project has announced the arrival of the first preview version of JRuby 1.7.0. Notable changes in the release include use of Ruby 1.9.3 for the default runtime mode, support for Java 7's invokedynamic, and various performance and concurrency improvements. Its developers also note that support for Java 5 has been dropped. JRuby 1.7.0.preview1 is available to download from the project's site.

(crve)