Ruby on Rails 0.13 Out Today with AJAX Superpowers

Robert J. Berger writes "The Ruby on Rails team announced that "After the longest gap between releases since Rails was made public and after more than 225 fixes and new features, the final major release before the 1.0 milestone has arrived." This is a major update to what is to many developers consider the new tool for developing sophisticated interactive database driven web applications. It integrates backend Model/View/Controller object-oriented model with AJAX based clients so that the developer can focus on the app and not on the details of basic mechanisms. You really can do much more with much less coding. The new release adds a completely rewritten visual effects engine, drag-and-drop capability including sortable lists, and autocompleting text fields to Rails. All building on top of an upgraded version of Prototype, the javascript foundation for Ajax in Rails ... Check out the very cool demos at script.aculo.us."

Comments

Re:ad

[chris_mahan]

In Soviet Ru... What's Ruby on Rails?

Oh, in Japan!!!

hehe

Re:solaris/firefox 1.04

[heinousjay]

I guess both of you running solaris will have to suffer.

Impressive, but...

[RAMMS EIN]

Wow, these demos are really impressive indeed. Not that they are doing anything that couldn't have been done with Internet Explorer 4, but how little Ruby code is required to make it all work.

That said, this technology is full of problems by its nature. Browser support is no longer the issue it once was (especially if the framework takes care of the remaining differences for you), but many browsers do DHTML very slowly, and more often than not it just doesn't have the right feel to it (as in, it still looks like a static page with moving parts, rather than a truely interactive application). And, one of my pet peeves, communicating with the server after the page has been loaded is clumsy and inefficient at best.

What I feel the world needs for the next phase of web development is a standard (especially portable) way to define real native applications. I once quickly whipped up something that parsed a UI in XML format, then used GTK to render it. GTK could easily be replaced by Cocoa or Win32 here. Pair this with some kind of scripting language (I think Ruby would be a good choice), and you can write native applications in a light-weight and portable way. Native UI, filesystem interaction, networking, it's all there.

From there, only some integration with the web is called for (at least, I think that would be a Good Thing). Something along the lines of allowing these applications to be embedded in XHTML, and sandbox them (limit filesystem access to a single, dedicated directory, limit disk space usage, etc.)

The only real problem I can see is that this adds Yet Another Standard That Isn't. It will only fly if it is widely supported, and that won't happen until it gains enough momentum. Seeing what happened to Java applets, Flash, early DHTML attempts, and the popularity of XUL, I am tempted to conclude that people just don't want all that. Just the text, please. Well, I can sympathize with that, too.