I am finding that Ruby is “my style” of programming language for many tasks. One that would be very well suited to Ruby, would be driving the browser VM, what we end up using JavaScript for now.
Ruby would be ideal for this task IMO, and I wonder if anyone has created an extension for Firefox at least. It would be hard to practically deploy with Ruby, until there was enough of an uptake of course… but you can still dream.
One of the problems to overcome is the fact that now, we don’t really modularize our web scripting code a lot. The most we do is have seperate .js files which encapsulate logic.
What if we had a mechanism in which the script could contain metadata which would look like dependencies in Maven.
E.g.
“My script needs My::Module version 2.4, and ActiveRecord 1.0, and ….”
Then there could be a local repo which would allow us to share code. Something like this would change the way we think about web scripting on the client, and move from a ‘hacker’ perspective, to something more mature. Of course, we would have to have a sandbox-like system to stop people from doing Bad Things.
February 24th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Yo Dion,
What happened to Groovy?? :)
February 24th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Hey, the more the merrier.
<script language=”groovy”>
works for me too :)
February 24th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
So you want something like Ruby Web Start? But instead of starting a separate app you want it to run in the browser and just make use of the “go get ruby” and “go get library x from here” functionality… couldn’t be that hard to do…
February 25th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
Take a look at the NetWindows Javascript library. It’s very modular and has the ability to automatically load the other libs it needs. Pretty neat. The docs suck, though…
February 28th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
There’s also a ruby.js (googleable). It adds Ruby-like features and API to your JavaScript environment.