Steve talked about his work with porting Rails to JavaScript at FooCamp.
Yowser. Part of me thinks it is cool as JavaScript isn’t a bad language as many think (not that it doesn’t have crazy warts), and JavaScript on client and server can be interesting.
Part of me thinks that it is crazy, and brings up the question on when something can be called “X on Rails”. How much do you have to port? Don’t you need Ruby-y thinks for a lot of it? Did you port ActiveFoo too? Or, did you just use some of the nice “features” of Rails (convention blah blah) and really you have done a totally different framework, and you would be better off calling it something else? :)
June 25th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
We mustn’t forget the lesson of “Groovy on Rails”. David made it quite clear he wasn’t cool with a port being called Rails for a simple reason: it isn’t Rails. He requested the Grails guys change the name, and they did so. JRuby on Rails is ok because it actually is the same code. Steve’s port is almost certainly very cool (I missed his talk due to another I wanted to see, though I caught him for a few minutes afterwards), but it’s not Rails.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:16 am
OK, so if this is not really Rails, why not use Phobos? Anything new?
June 27th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
…this has my interest, definitely, no matter what name they use. The efficiency factor in Rails is undeniable, and to have a port that runs on the JVM would certainly create some adopters. Just hearing about this today via Steve’s blog and your post, I have to check it out.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
In reference to the ‘ActiveFoo’ I know he mentioned using Hibernate instead of porting the whole ActiveRecord over. I really really love the whole idea of using JS/Rhino, having access to the Java framework (lots of libraries etc) would be nice.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
amzing blog,cheers
November 16th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
How much do you have to port?