Ruby on Rails & AJAX
I just tried out Ruby on Rails for the first time after reading the article “Railing on AJAX” in the November 2005 edition of Software Development. I first saw RoR in action at No Fluff Just Stuff demoed by Dave Thomas. This is a framework that strictly adheres to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, which means that changes in configuration are only required in one area instead of having rippling effects throughout the application. It also relies heavily on convention instead of configuration, so once you’re familiar with the setup it is quick and easy to add functionality. Scripts are provided for generating web applications, controllers within those applications, and more. It also comes with an ORM tool known as “Active Record” which is supposed to be very nice for simple CRUD operations.
This article also mentions the AJAX support provided by RoR, and it gives a simple example of how to use it. In the example, no JavaScript coding is required…the application comes with JavaScript libraries called from Ruby for performing the AJAX calls.
Ruby, RoR and AJAX have received quite a bit of press coverage lately. It will be interesting to see how they affect the industry in the coming months and years.
