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It's not Flash, and it's not fancy, but it is massively multi-player, free and ad-free. Give WEBoggle a try, and maybe throw something in the tip jar if you like it - I could really use it right now.

Yes they are, coding in Ruby or Python is actually geniuinely fun and rewarding. Not having the language go in the way and prevent you from thinking about the program (the forest) because you have to think about the code (the tree) is like discovering programmation over again.

This is absolutely true. After wanting to take a look at Python for a while, I finally wrote my first program in it this weekend. It's a simple script that finds all words in a Boggle grid. (Useful for cheating here). It took maybe an hour of looking up the proper syntax for reading files and creating lists and such (all of which are intuitive and easy to remember, unlike Perl), and it worked perfectly on the first run. It was only then that I realized how little code it had taken and how *pretty* it was: Java would have had loads of redundant code with classes and casts and explicit list creation and copying, and Perl would have had about the same line count but peppered with inane "@$" prefixes for the lists of lists.

Python is good. Check it out, even if you think the significant whitespace is silly. (I'm still undecided; I don't like being at the mercy of how text editors interpret spacing, but it does improve readability somewhat).

Good example. This one is better. My demos are better yet. ;-)

Asynchronous XMLHttpRequest has really opened a lot of doors for this sort of stuff, and there's still a great deal of scope for new and interesting web applications.

links to great time wasters like AJAX magnetic poetry, AJAX magnetic letters, and AJAX Weboggle

Ha. That's funny. WEBoggle was probably the major inspiration for the stuff I'm working on, when I first discovered it a few months ago. It's really a brilliant implementation of Boggle - so simple and enjoyable. Great fun.

Even though my partner is now dreadfully addicted to it :), I must thank you for making it. It's really cool.

When I have a bit more time I'm thinking of having a bash at implementing a Fungus clone using this sort of technology - there's probably a huge variety of simple-but-addictive games that'd be well suited to this kind of framework.

I wish that I had read about JSON before coding up my own yet-another-lightweight data format for WEBoggle. It uses scgi with a persistent Python server rather than mod_python, and is a single-page application. My experience of JavaScript is quite similar to yours, although I'm a lot more affected by compatibility concerns.