Opal has recently won the prestigious Fukuoka Ruby Award for Outstanding Performance in the 2023 edition. This is a major achievement for the project and its developers, and it reflects the significant contributions that Opal has made to the Ruby programming language and its ecosystem.
Opal is an open-source project that allows developers to write Ruby code and run it in the browser. It achieves this by compiling Ruby code into JavaScript, which can then be executed in a browser environment. This approach has many advantages, including the ability to reuse existing Ruby code and the ability to write web applications entirely in Ruby, without needing to use JavaScript at all.
Opal has been around since 2011, and it has steadily gained popularity over the years. It is now widely used by Ruby developers who want to use Ruby on both the front-end and the back-end of their applications or who want to port their Ruby libraries to JavaScript.
The Fukuoka Ruby Award is an annual award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the Ruby programming language and its ecosystem. It is organized by the Fukuoka Ruby and Software Industry Promotion Committee, which is based in Fukuoka City, Japan. The award has been running since 2009, and it has become one of the most prestigious awards in the Ruby community.
Opal winning the award for Outstanding Performance is particularly impressive. This category recognizes projects that have made a significant impact on the Ruby ecosystem, either by introducing new features, improving performance, or solving difficult problems. It is a testament to the quality and usefulness of Opal that it has been recognized in this way.
The core team of Opal is very proud of this achievement, and we would like to thank the Fukuoka Ruby Award committee for recognizing the hard work and dedication that goes into creating and maintaining Opal. We would also like to thank the Opal community for their support and encouragement over the years.
We want to give special recognition to the following people, who have made significant contributions to the project:
- Adam Beynon, for starting the project
- Andy Maleh, for showing the world how to use Opal creatively with Glimmer (and winning another Fukuoka Ruby Award in the process!)
- Brady Wied, for his work on Opal-RSpec
- Forrest Chang, for his work on promoting Opal, for writing useful developer tools
- Guillaume Grossetie for his work on Asciidoctor.js and upstreaming bug-fixes to Opal
- Ilia Bylich, for his work on the parser and compiler
- Jan Biedermann, for his active participation in the community, and for building Isomorfeus
- Kenichi Kamiya, for going after less known Ruby features and making Opal more complete
- meh, for his sustained work on the ecosystem and for building Opal-Browser
- Mitch VanDuyn, for his technical and financial support and for building Hyperstack
- Ryan Stout, for his work on the (now defunct) Volt framework, which introduced many users to Opal
- Vais Salikhov, for his work on the core library
The list could never be complete, but we want to thank all the people that have contributed to Opal in the past and have helped to make it the project it is today. Please refer to the Opal ecosystem page for a more complete list of libraries and projects that use Opal.
The future of Opal looks bright. With the support of the Ruby community and the recognition of the Fukuoka Ruby Award, it is likely to continue to grow and evolve in the years to come. Developers who want to write web applications in Ruby now have a powerful tool at their disposal, and they can look forward to even more innovations from the Opal project in the future.
In conclusion, Opal winning the Fukuoka Ruby Award for Outstanding Performance is a significant achievement for the project and its developers. It highlights the importance and value of the project in the Ruby ecosystem and brings attention to its unique approach to web development.