Exciting: Ajax and Ruby on Rails
I’ve involved myself with web application development for a few years now. My first implementation was a LAMP web application for my high school summer job at Integrity Talent, Inc. - a jazz agency website with an artist biography database. It has an administrator login that allows for new biographies with photos to be uploaded to the roster. Since then I’ve mucked with various web applications. I’ve done some .NET projects at work, created custom plugins for a few PHP plugins for MassWrestling.com’s CMS, did the LiveJournal memory search engine (see previous post), among others.
But now my attention’s been caught by Ajax - the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It’s a pretty powerful idea. Google is on the forefront with their Google Maps and Google Suggest tools, which take advantage of the concept.
For a long time, I’ve shied away from JavaScript. The paradigm of browser side code implied all kinds of compatability issues that never happen when you avoid client-side code. But the implications of a native-client app experience that is gained in this new paradigm is extremely tempting.
I’ve toyed with C# and PHP for web apps, but never tried any other languages for them. There’s a message being touted by the Ruby language - that their web application framework, titled “Ruby on Rails”, is the absolute easiest and best new way to create web applications. It comes ready and easy to handle AJAX style web application implementations.
So now I just need to find some sort of good reason to give a Ruby on Ajax implementation a “hello world” try. In terms of personal gain, I can just imagine in the next few years the demand for development in this kind of technologies. It just further corroborates the fact that application momentum really is moving towards thin client and away from desktop clients. All the more reason for Microsoft to be scared, as well, since their major profit base comes from desktop applications such as Office.
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