Swearing on Rails

2005, October 19 - 7:08pm — afreytes

AJAX? Rails? Ruby? xhttprequest? No it's not a new form of swearing I'm using. Rather, these are new technologies that are taking the web development world by storm. Though it seems like few developers here in Puerto Rico

know about them.

I going to write an article on those technologies. An explanation actually of what they do and what their aims are. Also, just why these are so revolutionary and wheter the revolution is hope, hype or fad. The full article won't make it to this blog however. It seems people have read my writing and found it good (at least I hope so). Hopefully I'm not getting ahead of myself but I'm thinking that in time I will get published.

So what I'm gonna do is summarize some of the point to be used in the article and give you a link in case you are the programming (and adventurous) type:

AJAX

Stands for Asynchronous Javascript and HTML.
It is used to create what are called Rich Client Applications. In this case the client isn't you, it is your browser. If you have ever used Outlook Web Access with Internet Explorer or Google's GMail with Firefox then you have used an AJAX application.
AJAX is the reason why Microsoft is so scared of Google (or not, those Redmond guys are queer).

XMLHTTPRequest

Is the method (an API really) that makes it possible for the browser and webserver to pass data to each other without the need for the browser to call for and refresh a webpage and also change the webpage that the browser is already displaying.

Ruby

This is just another server side programming language. Like PHP or ASP.

Rails

Rails is a web application framework, akin to Microsoft's .NET though .NET tries to do more than web applications. Rails makes it so that you can write a smallish applications in minutes. Yes! Mere minutes.

Where does Ruby and Rails have to do with AJAX and XMLHTTPRequest? I think I'll leave that for the article. I promise to put it here if it isn't accepted.

Now, if you can't wait it out and you have some web programming experience click on this post's title. It will take you to an all-in-one server solution where you can try Rails out. It is very similar to the concept of the Uniform Server that I covered before (in this post).

Oh, one last thing. Did I mention everything I've talked about is open source software? Now, that is the reason Microsoft is really scared about these days.