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

This is fantastic stuff!

[Per Wigren]

I've been playing with Rails since september and I've run edge rails (subversion trunk) for about a month while developing my soon-to-be-released rewrite of my site that uses a lot of this Ajax stuff in a user friendly way.

Users can sort the pictures in their galleries by dragging them to the position they want and doubleclick them to hide them (it then becomes 50% transparent). The user always get immediate feedback without reloading the page thanks to Ajax. For translators the site is inline editable. Just doubleclick on a textfield or alt+click on a string to edit it inline. Click "save" and it's changed. Admin stuff is always available but hidden by default in drawers that you can slide in when you need them so you can be logged in as an admin an change any setting, delete posts etc without needing to go to a separate admin page or have a cluttered interface. You don't even have to reload the page in most cases...

All this stuff is damn easy to implement thanks to the wonders of Ruby on Rails and the Prototype framework.

solaris/firefox 1.04

[Endymion]

wow... I really want to try this... I love the idea of ruby on rails, but all of this client side code is nuts.

Of all the samples, only the shoping cart works at all on Firefox1.04 on solaris. Everything else just does nothing and renders horribly. Even the shoping cart demo fails to render things properly, even when it works.

sigh...

I really really really want to like this... but how is relying on the client to run code properly sane, with all the different clients out there?