Anybody using Ruby on Rails or other AJAX approaches?

[Pangloss]

Just curious if anybody's working in this area. These are approaches to web applications that do not involve Java or .NET development environments. Instead the environment uses Javascript and XML exclusively. Google Maps is said to be a good example of this in action. The Wikipedia article on AJAX is pretty good (can be found here), and it talks about some of the recent criticism including the intensive development and testing requirements (which seems to run contrary to some of the claims).

 

I've looked briefly at Ruby on Rails in the past and it looked like an interesting system, but I haven't done anything with it yet. Mostly these days I find myself playing around with ASP.NET apps, and the odd Java applet. But I feel like I might as well be wearing a disco suit for all the currentness of this approach. (Other programmers point and laugh when my bitstreams pass their routers.) ;-)

[bascule]

Ruby on Rails is awesome... the best web development framework I've ever seen. There's also AJAX on Rails so you don't have to deal with any nasty JavaScript yourself.

[Pangloss]

Cool, thanks. I think I may have to check both of 'em out.

[phcatlantis]

Just curious if anybody's working in this area. These are approaches to web applications that do not involve Java or .NET development environments. Instead the environment uses Javascript and XML exclusively. Google Maps is said to be a good example of this in action. The Wikipedia article on AJAX is pretty good (can be found here[/url']), and it talks about some of the recent criticism including the intensive development and testing requirements (which seems to run contrary to some of the claims).

 

I've done two complete web apps and three prototyped thick applications so far in RoR and I'm thoroughly impressed. For one, I love Ruby as a language period, there's nothing out there that can match its OO model and depth of reflection. Rails is a great framework in that--as far as I've encountered--lives up to its DRY and convention-based principles, but also because it leverages Ruby's truly OO quality to expose so much of itself to extension and revision by developers without breaking. Ajax in Ruby is nice for typical tasks like form observers, remote links, and one shot effects, but you'll still really need to learn the practice in Javascript to fully leverage its power in crafting statefulness. I can say that for myself, I don't see a need to go back to Perl, Python or PHP.