I was thinking you wanted to write an article about different developers' perspectives on different development ecosystems and platforms, based on their experience and skills. I don't think I'll ever write a complete article just about that, at least for TR -- it occurs to me there simply isn't enough concrete material in it to make it appropriate as an article for this venue. I will, however, touch on it briefly in the introduction to an article I'm planning for the open source column right now, though.

I might put together something along the lines of a "basic Ruby techs" explanation, I guess. I'll have to see if there's a set of "default" technologies that makes sense to explain. Considering the open source Unixy culture of the main Ruby community, though, it's difficult to settle on a single example of central categories of technologies to consider "basic" or "default". It would be a lot easier to write an article covering the different Ruby implementations, and another covering the various Web frameworks, and so on. I mean, sure, YARV is the new default Ruby implementation, and Rails is the default Web application framework, but there's no single default marshaling format, no single database access library, and so on. An article covering three "basic" Ruby technologies with three to five sentences each seems pretty scant and dull.

I guess I could spin a "basic Ruby techs I use a lot", and ignore the "defaultness" or popularity of my choices for the most part.

> The JRuby ecosystem is only appealing to me because it allows Ruby to be run in places it normally would not go.

Considering YARV runs just about everywhere, there are few cases where JRuby would be needed, by that standard. Android is the only platform that comes immediately to mind, and if you have a rooted Android device you might even be able to port YARV to it as a native binary. I'm not sure about that, though.