Move Over AJAX, Make Room for ARAX

sasserstyl writes "eWeek reports that Microsoft's Silverlight platform will support Ruby client-side scripting, enabling ARAX — or Asynchronous Ruby and XML. Would be cool to have the option to script client-side in something other than Javascript. 'In essence, using ARAX, Ruby developers would not have to go through the machinations of using something like the RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility, where they write Ruby code and RJS generates JavaScript code to run on the client, Lam said. "Sure, you could do it that way, but then at some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself," he said. "So there's always that sense of, 'Now I'm in another world. And wouldn't it be nice if I have this utility class I wrote in Ruby...' Today if I want to use it in the browser I have to port it to JavaScript. Now I can just run it in the browser."'"

Comments

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[hansamurai]

It's a scripting language that was under the radar until Ruby on Rails came around. Rails is a well done framework for Ruby that opened up the language to the masses.

And because you brought up Java too, there's also JRuby, a Java implementation of Ruby.

Re:Somebody update NoScript.

[bob.appleyard]

Strong and weak are often confused with dynamic and static. They're orthogonal concepts.

An example of a weakly statically typed language would be C. You have to declare the all the types, so you know what type you're dealing with compile time, but a boolean can be treated like an integer or a pointer. An example of a strongly dynamically typed language would be Lisp. You don't have type declarations (well in Common Lisp they're optional), and you don't know the type of a variable at compile time, but a list cannot be treated like a number.

You do get dynamically weakly typed languages, like PHP. You also get statically strongly typed languages, like Haskell. Assuming that strong and static are the same thing, or that weak and dynamic is the same thing, is a big mistake.