SciCom (Scientific Computing) for Ruby brings the power of R to the Ruby community. SciCom is based on Renjin, a JVM-based interpreter for the R language for statistical computing. Over the past two decades, the R language for statistical computing has emerged as the de facto standard for analysts, statisticians, and scientists. Today, a wide range of enterprises – from pharmaceuticals to insurance – depend on R for key business uses. Renjin is a new implementation of the R language and environment for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), whose goal is to enable transparent analysis of big data sets and seamless integration with other enterprise systems such as databases and application servers. Renjin is still under development, but it is already being used in production for a number of client projects, and supports most CRAN packages, including some with C/Fortran dependencies. SciCom integrates with Renjin and allows the use of R inside a Ruby script. In a sense, SciCom is similar to other solutions such as RinRuby, Rpy2, PipeR, etc. However, since SciCom and Renjin both target the JVM there is no need to integrate both solutions and there is no need to send data between Ruby and R, as it all resides in the same JVM. Further, installation of SciCom does not require the installation of GNU R; Renjin is the interpreter and comes with SciCom. Finally, although SciCom provides a basic interface to Renjin similar to RinRuby, a much tighter integration is also possible.

MDArray-jCSV (jCSV for short) is the first and only (as far as I know) multidimensional CSV reader. Multidimensional? Yes... jCSV can read multidimensional data, also known sometimes as 'panel data'. jCSV is based on Super CSV (http://super-csv.github.io/super-csv/index.html), a java CSV library. According to Super CSV web page its motivation is 'for Super CSV is to be the foremost, fastest, and most programmer-friendly, free CSV package for Java'. jCSV motivation is to bring this view to the Ruby world, and since we are in Ruby, make it even easier and more programmer-friendly.