Hi @rlkoshak -
It was certainly never my intent to swoop in and replace anyone’s effort on anything. If that is what has happened I sincerely apologize. I would be happy to collaborate.
I am sharing what I have now, which is certainly a work in progress, for the purpose of collaborating and getting feedback.
When I started working on this in early November all I found in the forum was a couple of very old posts where people said they were going to work on JRuby, but couldn’t get it working. This led to be believe there were no large active JRuby projects underway. JRuby didn’t work “out of the box” and provided some very confusing error messages. I did a lot of debugging and working with the JRuby devs to understand exactly what was happening and found the root cause, which I opened as an issue against the core. Given the fact that no one had solved this issue (that I was aware of) and JRuby doesn’t work without it led me to believe there was not a concerted effort around building a ruby based rules system when I started.
Obviously, I am aware of the incredible work that @5iver and others have done in the arena of bringing python to the OpenHAB community. Without the groundbreaking work by that team I wouldn’t have been able to build this. @5iver and I have had a some conversations and I have shared some my lessons learned and he has shared his which let me overcome some of the hurdles I hit as well as guide me through some of the complexities (groups, etc) of the rules engine.
I did share a very early version of the proposed syntax with @5iver. My takeaway from that conversation was that the project he works on has a goal of aligning closely to the scripting API as a guiding principle. This is different from my guiding principles which I outline above. I certainly think there is room for collaboration and it would be great to have a common base. Once I get community feedback my plan was and is to submit it to the openhab-scripters repo to see what can be shared and if it can be part of that project.
My goal is to combine my passion for Ruby with OpenHAB to create a rules system that I (and hopefully others) would enjoy. If there is another group of people working on JRuby in OpenHAB and I have subverted there efforts, that was not my intent and came from lack of knowledge not malice. I am happy to rectify and collaborate and push forward together.