A Plan for MongoDB and JRuby
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MongoDB will continue to support JRuby.
In April 2021, our Ruby team began to discuss the possibility of removing MongoDBs official support for JRuby. At the time, we decided to shelve these discussions and revisit in a year. In March 2022, right on schedule, we began examining metrics and reviewing user feedback around JRuby, as well as evaluating our backlog of items around this runtime.
JRuby itself is still actively maintained and used by many Ruby developers, but our own user base tends toward MRI/CRuby or ‘vanilla Ruby’. We primarily looked at telemetry from active MongoDB Atlas clusters, commercial support cases, and a number of other sources, like Stack Overflow question volume, etc.
We decided based on the data available that it would be safe to drop support for JRuby from our automated tests, and stop accepting pull requests related to this runtime.
We did not expect this decision to be controversial.
As a company that manages numerous open source projects we work in a public space. Our JIRA and GitHub issues are available to peruse. And so it was not very long before a user commented on this work and asked us not to do this please.
One of the core JRuby maintainers, Charles Nutter, also reached out on the Ruby ticket to discuss this change.
Upon opening a pull request to action this decision, the resulting community feedback encouraged us to reconsider this decision. As the goal of any open source project is to bolster adoption and engagement ultimately we chose to reverse course for the time being, especially seeing as JRuby had subsequently tweeted out their upcoming 9.4 release would be compatible with both Rails 7 and Ruby 3.1.
Following the JRuby announcement, TruffleRuby 22.1 was released, so it seems the JVM-based Ruby ecosystem is more active than we anticipated.
We decided to reverse our decision around JRuby, quite simply, because the community asked us to. Our decisions should be informed by the open source community - not just the developers who work at MongoDB - and if we are too hasty, or wrong, we would like to be able to hear that without flinching and respond appropriately.
So. Though we weren’t at RailsConf 22 this year, know that if your next application is built using JRuby you should be able to count on MongoDB Atlas being ready to host your application’s data.
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