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

Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Does yours?

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[stoolpigeon]

Not only that - my platform doesn't support silverlight.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[catmistake]

Agreed.
Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XMLhttpRequest) was given a name because it was a growing trend; many decided to use it independently, and naming it something made sense. ARAX, or whatever, is just an idea a few people have. I see no trend.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[happyemoticon]

It's more similar to Python in my mind. It's a post-Perl interpreted language that attempts to have better object-orientation while not being overly restrictive. It inherits a lot more from Perl than Python does, so you can accomplish most tasks in a variety of ways. Neither is anywhere near as rigid as Java - you don't have to catch or throw every exception, you don't have to make ten subclasses and an interface to write Hello World, etc.

I get into these kinds of discussions with my boss all the time. He looks at Java as the ultimate golden hammer, and I tend to use a variety of languages. There are a bunch of little syntactic things I love about Ruby, but in the end it's mostly a question of style, politics and library support.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[an.echte.trilingue]

Microsoft knows that web applications will soon threaten their client-side sales model. They also know that places like Google have enough of a head start in the AJAX world that they will never catch up (tried google apps lately? It is really getting there, especially if you do a lot of collaborative work). This is why IE's javascript standards compliancy still sucks balls even though its CSS support isn't bad: they want to make life hard for people trying to develop in AJAX.

Now they are trying to develop proprietary technologies to compete: Silverlight and this new ARAX bull will replace Flash and AJAX. They will release some shit-hot developer tools that make it really easy to build shiny websites on the Silverlight/ARAX stack so that before long half the web is written in it. Then, ARAX and Silverlight will get proprietary extensions (new functionality! woot!) and break on non-IE browsers (got to assure that OS monopoly). They will also add some undocumented APIs so that the (subscription-based) Microsoft Apps runs faster than anything anybody else comes ups with, and boom!

Profit.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[nuzak]

MVC in web apps has about as much to do with Smalltalk's old MVC as unix signals have to do with the physical control lines they used to correspond to (gimme a break I couldn't find a car analogy). MVC is nothing more than three-tier, with the middle tier itself adding some extra separation between processing requests (controller) and generating output (view).

HTTP is stateless. So is UDP. Does that make every online game that uses it stateless? The web is not a protocol.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[an.echte.trilingue]

First, IE 7's javascript engine is vastly fixed over what they offered before. I am afraid I am going to have to call shill on this one. I am sure that you remember that acid3 tests ECMAScript compliance.

• Trident (ie7): 13
• Trident (ie6): 6
• Gecko: 75

Opera and Safari are of course, disqualified as they hacked together 100 scores.

I tinker with JS a bit, and things like attaching event listeners, getting first children, getting attributes, getting values, getting the URL, basically everything DOM related has to be treated differently in IE.

Worse, XMLHttpRequest, the very core of AJAX, is broken in IE7, but not IE6.

I am sorry, but you are wrong on that count. I guess if you call horrible to slightly less horrible an improvement, this is a good thing.

Visual Studio 2008 works extremely well for creating AJAX enabled content that works cross-browser, without rolling all your own client code. Oh, it becomes clear. Microsoft wants to make it impossible to implement your own JS solution so that you have to buy into their development tools to build a site that works. What a surprise.

Third, Silverlight is not an IE/Windows only platform. It is, however, a Windows only platform. Moonlight is still vaporware, last I heard.

And if you really think they're going to try that bait and switch tactic again, you're nuts. MS is not that stupid. They actually want Silverlight to be valid and compete with Flash. What makes you say that?

But why am I arguing? I should be asking for examples of where MS is doing as you suggest they will. I cannot give examples of events that have yet to transpire. The company's history is well known.

Re:Somebody update NoScript.

[moderatorrater]

Not only that, but they're not adding a language that's significantly different. They're not adding Java (which Google might appreciate) or C/C++, they're adding Ruby, which is a language very similar to javascript (certainly more similar than JS or Ruby are to Java and their ilk). Port a language with better scalability and modularity, not more of the same.

Re:This time

[drinkypoo]

Everybody thinks that javascript just doesn't cut it for current Web Apps, and it was never meant to work like we make it work today.

Are you a troll (perhaps even a shill) or just a schmuck? There's nothing seriously wrong with Javascript as a language, only with specific implementations, some of which are actually quite good these days.

I'm guessing you are just a troll, but I don't want anyone to think you're right or anything and I have a little time on my hands :P

Re:This time

[poetmatt]

Why?

Why is this good to run Silverlight?

Running silverlight on anything non-windows is like shoving legal issues up someone's ass and waiting for them to cough out the settlement.

Ruby on rails also seemed to work just fine without siverlight...and as comments show, more languages in the mix is not a good thing.

So yes, people are trashing MS because there is something wrong with this. If MS did anything right, we wouldnt' trash MS, we'd praise them. In this case, as usual, they haven't done anything right. I'd be glad to praise MS if they actually did something that wasn't underhanded, but when was the last time you can recall them doing that?

Re:This time

[asc99c]

Probably shouldn't feed the troll, but ...

His argument was against your assertion that 'everybody thinks javascript just doesn't cut it for current web apps'.

This plainly isn't true as lots of people are actually very impressed by the javascript language, and just a bit frustrated that IE6 / IE7 / IE on Safari work so differently to everything else. For internal work I just ignore IE, and target Firefox only.

Even Joel has praise for javascript - take a look at his 'Can Your Programming Language Do This?' article at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html

A better option than Javascript would be great, but Ruby hardly looks like the best option. A much better use of time for Microsoft would be making their Javscript engine for IE more standards compliant.

Re:look more closely at TFA...

[recoiledsnake]

What's so insecure about the MSIL(by which I presume you mean .NET) compared to any other environment(Java, Rails, PHP, etc)? I am really curious to know. I know this is Slashdot but please try not to reply with 'Everyone knows it is'.