OStatic

Last week, members of the Ruby community received word that all but the most recent versions of the language contain a serious security hole, and should be upgraded immediately. The announcement indicated that the security problem allows an attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code from a remote location. Other than that general description, what is the problem? Well... the powers that be aren't telling. Zed Shaw, decided to blog about this, announcing the vulnerabilities, as well as the techniques that he used to uncover them.

One of the fascinating trends that the Java world has seen in the last few years is the growth of non-Java languages that use the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). After all, if you create a new programming language, you will need to write it for a particular platform. If you want your language to be portable across platforms, you will need to implement versions for each of those platforms. By contrast, if you implement your language on the JVM, then your language will work on any system with a JVM, which is basically everywhere. Four of these languages -- Jython, JRuby, Groovy, and Scala -- are released under open-source licenses, and are increasingly popular choices for programmers who value portability.