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

[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

[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

[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: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?

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: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.

Use arax, raggy!

[192939495969798999]

ruby ruby roo!

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?