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

[Reverend528]

Last week they embraced ruby. Now they are extending it. I can't wait to see what they'll do next!

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

[bsDaemon]

If they extinguished it, who would notice? Seriously -- I'm not trying to troll. WTF is Ruby and what is so great about it? It just seems like Java for people who hate Java from what little research I've done on it, but it also seems to be very popular (of course, hating Java is popular, too).

Can someone please tell me?

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm not seeing a problem.

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: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

[nuttycom]

Its syntax isn't like C? Cry me a river. Sure, the syntax could have been made more c-like (braces instead of do/end - and you can use braces if you like anyway) but the syntax isn't where you get the benefit of ruby.

The most important thing that Ruby has done, in my mind, is to make blocks, closures, and runtime metaprogramming mainstream. So while the syntax may not add much, the language features add a hell of a lot. After writing code in C and Java for a number of years, switching over to Ruby took me all of a week.

That being said, the supposed productivity gains are mostly hype, because you end up spending the time you gained in writing the code to begin with having to write a lot more integration tests to ensure correctness for things that the compiler deals with in a typesafe language.

Rails has been pretty important insofar as it's given a kick in the ass to a bunch of other languages. I agree though that the implementation is a bit of a nightmare, and the lack of built-in dependency injection is a hassle.

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

[Jugalator]

Does yours? Who cares about that. It runs in Silverlight. It's whether your browser supports the Silverlight plugin that matters. IE does, Firefox on Windows (2, not yet 3) does, Opera does inofficially (to be official in the future), Safari on OS X does. Firefox on Linux is WIP and a Mono project.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[mythras]

Does this mean my new ARAX sites will be as reliable as Twitter? If so, I'm gonna need to extend the minutes on my on-call cellphone plan.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[Reverend528]

Every language is for people who hate perl. Everyone hates perl. Especially perl developers.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[encoderer]

Ok, I'll bite. What makes MVC a "piss poor model" for web applications?

The only thing you mentioned was scalability.

Personally, I find the MVC pattern applies to web apps wonderfully. Being able to "plug and play" views is far more helpful in the web universe than it is in rich client programming.

I can create a default view, lately that's been a standard XHTML interface with Ajax, usually leveraging the ext.js library.

And I also create a simplified HTML-only view for graceful degredation on clients that are not using JavaScript.

And a view for mobile interfaces.

On "data grid pages" I can plug-in a view that outputs the data in XML or Excel format.

For reporting I can create a view for an on-screen HTML based report, or I can plug in a view that displays it as a PDF or, again, XML or Excel.

Meanwhile, I only create the data models and controllers once.

This is FAR easier and faster to create and maintain.

And in todays world, unless you're a top-1% web destination it's a FAR wiser move to optimize for development time and cost than it is to optimize for the machine.

Adding a server is much cheaper than adding a developer.

Believe it or not, I'm not a fan of Rails. I'm especially not a fan of ActiveRecord. In ruby, DataMapper is a much better Db layer than is ActiveRecord.

But to denounce Rails because it's MVC? I'd love to hear why you feel that way.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[morgan_greywolf]

It's like java, but not as fast, secure, or scalable.

No. Ruby is what would happen if you put Java, Python, Perl and Common Lisp in a blender.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[an.echte.trilingue]

NEVER You almost had a good argument until you used a superlative. Google Apps for domains is clearly superior to Outlook/Exchange* for small businesses, for example. SugarCRM and other web-based application customer management systems such as pyrameed are at at least as good as solutions such as SAP for up to medium sized businesses. Web based apps offer:

• easier administration for both systems as a whole and the client machines
• world wide access
• real-time collaboration

Our business runs entirely on web-based applications except for MS word, and like I said, google docs is getting there. The net is only getting faster and I can't image a single advantage of client-side software for business administration. Applications like photoshop and autocad will probably remain local for years to come, but that is a pretty small niche in the overall scheme of things.

*: somebody always counters this with "but you don't control the server!!!1!" Look, no small business has its own mail server. Google's is just as secure as Joe Blows ISP.

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[ShieldW0lf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_(computing)#Comparison_with_the_MVC_architecture

Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby

[encoderer]

"So for the web, it degenerates both object oriented programming and MVC into mere ways to organize your code"

That's nonsense.

If for no other reason than the fact that displaying a page often involves some real work. Some real heavy-lifting. Often far more than just a couple database queries being fed into a grid or report.

OOP brings order, structure, reuse and quality control to large, complex systems (and website/webapps can certainly be very large and very complex) That's true no matter what context it's being used in, web, rich client, whatever.

Yes, there is overhead involved in creating objects. But even in your worst-case scenario where there is no shared state, the overhead is hardly a deal breaker: It's far better to optimize for the developer than it is to optimize for the machine. Unless you're working on a website in the 99th percentile of traffic, you probably don't have a lot to worry about.

Further, your scenario IS worst-case.

For example, we have an in-house framework. It's not all that different than the ones you've seen. Take, for example, a simple web form:

You instantiate the data model (need to pre-populate the form), you instantiate a webform object, which is view-tier and is just a widget that binds to a data model and presents an HTML form.

When that form is rendered in HTML, the webform object and the data model it binds to are serialized and stored in the session.

When the user submits the form the front-controller will look at the formkey submitted with the form and unserialize the form and model objects. It pulls the values from the HTTP Post into the data model and they're validated and saved.

This is nothing revolutionary. It's not even complicated. And it's just one of a dozen ways to overcome the no-shared-state problem.

The idea that OOD is "degenerated" in a web environment is ludicrous. Procedural development is a thing of the past. The idea of 1 page : 1 script that runs from line 1 to line n is just not adequate for MOST modern web apps.

Todays systems are not your mothers web applications. We're doing far too much on the web. Applications the size of the web applications that are written today would collapse under their own weight if done procedurally.

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.

Look at ol' MS

[flanksteak]

Doing a little something for developer mindshare. But then this is really just a way to push .NET.

Questions:

1. Anybody see Firefox adding support for other scripting languages as a result of this?
2. Does this bode well for things like Moonlight and Mono?

Re:Look at ol' MS

[Bryansix]

But AJAX works great in .NET already and it does everything you want it to do and you don't need to know javascript to make it work. All you need to do is set the right attributes in the controls you call and presto you have AJAX. The server takes care of generating all the javascript for it to work. Why they would move to this is totally beyond me besides malicious intentions.

Not only...

[ncannasse]

There's already Java (with GWT) and haXe

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:Move over ARAX

[ShieldW0lf]

Hey Balmer!

I've put together a language and framework.

I call them Diamond and Diamond-On-Wings.

They're not very good... rather cumbersome and don't scale very well, but they give you something flashy with only 3 lines of code, and I've got a ton of amateur developers who haven't learned well enough not to use it yet on board.

Can I have a blowjob too?

Come on... Developers, Developers, Developers!!! and all that jazz...

On your knees, fat man!

Re:Somebody update NoScript.

[Simon (S2)]

Weak security because of dynamic typing? You really have to elaborate on this, because like this it just makes no sense. How is a strong typed languare more secure than a dynamic typed one?

look more closely at TFA...

[Fallen Andy]

It's IronRuby in other words Ruby compiled to MSIL. So in principle it should inherit all the (in)security of that environment (winks).

Really this isn't a suprise as SilverLight was supposed to be the first outing of the Dynamic CLR (support for IronPython, IronRuby etc.). MS has been quite enthusiastic about dynamic languages ever since Jim Hugenin (former JPython author) started working for them.

Andy

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'.

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?

Hmmm...

[Mr Z]

Maybe we need an infrastructure for this. An infrastructure that would be common among multiple languages. And then you could run any language that can target this common language infrastructure. And if you manage it properly it could be secure....

See, that's sharp isn't it? Of course, it might seem like I'm parroting a bunch of buzzwords in this monologue, but I really have a message... I'm not just making small talk. I think that's enough pearls of wisdom in one post.

--Joe

Re:Do we really need this?

[urcreepyneighbor]

Silverlight is going to allow .NET code, not just Ruby. Sweet jesus. It's ActiveX 2.

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.

Re:Somebody update NoScript.

[Lobster Quadrille]

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Type+conversion+error%22+attack

Dynamic type conversions are a pretty common way to exploit SQL injection holes and circumvent input validation.

Use arax, raggy!

[192939495969798999]

ruby ruby roo!

Re:Use arax, raggy!

[hanshotfirst]

Fred: So let's see whose really behind the phantom's plot to drive everyone off the Internet...

Daphne: It's old man Gates from the haunted software company!

Velma: We figured it out after unraveling the clue - Mr. Ballmer was responsible for the ghostly floating chairs!

Bill: And we'd've gotten away with it too! If it weren't for you meddling script kiddies!

And ARAX isn't as good as AJAX

[einhverfr]

Ajax has always been second-best to Achilles, the greatest hero of the Trojan war. In other words, the only thing better than Ajax would be Achilles (maybe Asynchronous C or Haskall In Lisp List Extensible Style).

Who was this Arax fellow? What wars did he fight in?

Why only people like us come here

[sm62704]

Ruby
rails
Ruby on rails
Soap
Ajax
Ajax soap
Python
Perl
Java

Is it any wonder normal people think we're strange? (Ignore the rest of this comment, as it presently has too few characters per line (currently 8.5) but thankfully I can paste slashdot's retarded "error" message in the comment to correct this travesty)

ARAX?

[Microsift]

Ruh Roh!

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:Somebody update NoScript.

[Mctittles]

While it offers more than Flash does I don't know where people keep getting their ideas on "more" than flash does, but I'm suspecting it is from some dirty marketing campain from microsoft. You know if you search for silverlight you will find at the top of a google search are blogs about silverlight vs flash, but after reading a couple paragraphs you realize that it is no more than a commercial for silverlight...they even sound like a scripted commercial...and they compare flash from 15 years ago to silverlight instead of flash from today. Then after more digging I've found the comments for sites that write about silverlight are scripted half the time too. I've even found comment sections on articles written by microsoft staff in defense on their product so you know they are spending many hours searching the net to try and make sure anything within the first few pages of a search is biased.....it's annoying because it seems to be working, although very little people have actually used both silverlight and flash extensively, hearing a random person say "it is better" leads them to believe it. (END RANT)

Re:This time

[Tweenk]

Under 1000 lines for drag & drop support? This looks like a moderate amount of code, taking into account that you only get raw mouse coordinates from the browser in JS, and that it supports IE.

People dislike Javascript, but in fact it's very powerful. Its Achilles' heel seems to be that no one cares to really learn Javascript like a regular programming language. Rather, people doing Web development look at it as a hacky tool to add bling to their website. They learn small bits of it whenever they want some new effect they saw on the other guy's site, but never stop to learn how to use the vast array of built-in functions effectively, how to create objects, how closures and functional primitives work. Javascript is very much a "real" programming language, but its niche causes most to overlook its powerful and one-of-a-kind features and instead view it through the multitude of browser quirks one has to deal with when using Javascript in Ajax.

Learn JavaScript?

[KermodeBear]

[...] 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.

They never DID have to go through something like RJS. They could just, you know, learn JavaScript. It isn't very difficult.

Puh-lease... Ruby Is Redundant.(tm)

[AnomaliesAndrew]

So far everything I've seen that was at all "special" about Ruby is available in just about every other language via helper classes (like Integer for ints in Java) and perhaps slightly less graceful structures like callbacks (just look at jQuery, for example.)

Usually the reason I've picked a language to do a job has had nothing to do about syntax. The three biggest factors have always been: what do I already know, what has the best performance, and what can be developed quickest? It's always a balance of those 3.

I'll never use Ruby until it's supported widely enough, matured enough, and provides me with some reason to bother learning its API.

Considering I'm already intimately familiar with C, Java, PHP, and SQL, I think hell freezing over is a safer bet. In my limited observation, most of the people who tout Ruby as the future have never extensively programmed in another language (except maybe a handful of people who coded in the much older languages similar to Ruby.)

I especially love it when somebody claims to write a web server in 10 lines of Ruby... and all it took was using a 10,000 line library and a however-large interpreter. I'd like to see that stand up to a slash-dotting. Puh-lease...

Why Ruby?

[qazwart]

Because Ruby on Rails developers will not have to switch to JavaScript in order to do AJAX like stuff.

One of the problems in Web Development is using one language for the back end (whether Java, Ruby, or PHP) and then when you need some asynchronous action on the client side, you have to switch your syntax to JavaScript. It can be a bit of a pain. It's not that you may not know both JavaScript and Ruby, but that you have to keep switching between the two and that can make brain hurt.

I take it that Silverlight will be doing the "ARAX" side of things. It's actually a neat idea. You can use a single language for both the Client and Server side, but where JavaScript is built from the ground up to live inside a webpage, Ruby isn't. I guess that's why there's IronRuby which will be a bit more "JavaScript" like.

The big problem is that the Ruby interpreter will be Silverlight. Where as JavaScript is built into WebKit, an open source project, Silverlight is proprietary. If you create a new web browser, you can easily adopt WebKit and get a standardized JavaScript implementation. With ARAX, you're either going have to role your own or depend upon Microsoft to create a Silverlight interpreter.

The whole thing is to push not .NET, but Silverlight in order to take over the Flash market. The funny thing is that Flash is probably peeking in popularity. The problem is one of the shear diversity of web browsing platforms that will be coming out soon. The iPhone is just the first such device, and already sites are removing flash from their webpages in order to make them iPhone compatible. Yes, Adobe is going to release flash for the iPhone, but what happens when Android comes out? Is Adobe really going to build flash for each and every version of an Android handset? They simply don't have the resources. Microsoft will find the same situation with Silverlight. They simply won't be able to support all the platforms that people want to use.

In the old days, this was okay because it brought people into the Windows world. But, as people move from the desktop, Windows isn't the end all/be all platform it use to be. People like their iPhones and iPods. People will start buying Android based stuff. Symbian and RIM both are larger platforms. Windows Mobile is a distant fourth in sales this year. Measured in licenses, Windows Mobile is still more popular than the iPhone, but that doesn't include all the devices laying in some drawer gathering dust. Assuming a 2 year average product lifespan, Windows is fourth behind the iPhone which hasn't been out for a year yet. Can Microsoft (or is Microsoft even willing) to put Silverlight on all the various platforms out there? If not, developers just won't use ARAX.