By Jerry D'Antonio

Rumor has it that you can't write concurrent programs in Ruby. People once believed that the world was flat and we all know how that turned out. Between the native threads introduced in MRI 1.9 and the JVM threading available to JRuby, Ruby is now a valid platform for concurrent applications. What we've been missing--until now--are the advanced concurrency tools available to other languages like Clojure, Scala, Erlang, and Go. In this session we'll talk about the specific challenges faced when writing concurrent applications; we'll explore modern concurrency techniques such as agents, futures, promises, reactors, and supervisors; and we'll use various open source tools to craft safe, reliable, and efficient concurrent code. We'll write most of our code using the Concurrent Ruby gem but we'll also explore EventMachine and Celluloid.