Dion Almaer wrote:
>
> I have been doing a lot of work w/ Ajax, and the server side action piece.
>
> I think that Rails is perfectly suited for this task, and am
> really looking
> forward to taking some of our work and building our Rails based
> components.
>
> A web developer shouldn't have to know much to switch their app from
> traditional Big Request -> Big Response Rendering to Ajax.
>
> This is exciting stuff, but, of course, we need to be wary about going hog
> wild and making everything Ajax and freaking out our users, who
> have learned
> over many years on the web that the SUBMIT button is king ;)
>
> Dion
>
> Ps. Maybe there should be a sub-project of Rails for components like this.
> There is a core framework piece, where you can specify standard XML
> responses which the client side grabs as a DOM and does certain
> things (runs
> Javascript functions, twiddles content in the DOM, adds into the DOM, etc
> etc). I would love to work on this with people.

I don't know of anyone who is working on this in Rails (if I'm wrong, maybe
this statement will bring them out into the light!).

You should go ahead and create a RubyForge project for this and then invite
other interested developers to join you. I would do so myself if I weren't
already juggling too many Ruby "balls" along with my day job.

Curt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curt Hibbs [mailto:curt / hibbs.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 4:55 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: [OT] Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
>
> James G. Britt wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:45:34 +0900, Curt Hibbs <curt / hibbs.com> wrote:
> > > I always have trouble remembering whether its HttpXmlRequest, or
> > > XmlHttpRequest. In either case, its a poor moniker for such a
> > promising web
> > > app technique.
> >
> >
> > It's not a technique per se, it's a the name of a JavaScript object
> > for doing sync/async calls from the browser to to server.  Been around
> > since the last century, first as part of  Internet Explorer, then
> > Mozilla.
>
> I know, but it hasn't gotten much attention until Google wowed us with
> Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Suggest. Ta-Da Lists uses this
> too, but its a
> one-off solution specific to that web app.
>
> > > Well, it turns out someone *has* given it a name: Ajax (for
> > > Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). You can read about it here:
> >
> > What struck me about this article was a)  it's sort of pretentious,
> > unless there is some reasonably  robust dev lib to go with it, since
> > people have been doing this for some time now, and b) you can't tell,
> > as there appears to be no code released, except what you can decipher
> > from your browser when poking around "Google suggest".
> >
> > BTW, I've done some work on a JSON-RPC ORB thing (called Roy, after
> > Roy Orbison) that builds off of the Ruby JSON-parsing code from
> > Florain Frank.  It makes this sort of JavaScript Xml request stuff
> > with Ruby server-code quite trivial.   You register services using
> > Needle and call them from the browser.
> >
> > I need to gem it up for a nice release so people can find bugs
> and stuff.
>
> Nice!
>
> What I think we'll see someday, a new set of smart components integrated
> into web app frameworks that render GUI components in the browser that
> automatically know how to talk to their corresponding server-side objects
> for behind-the-scenes data transfer. This would make it much
> easier to build
> web apps whose GUI is as responsive as a desktop app (well... at least
> closer).
>
> I'd love to see someone do this with Rails.
>
> Curt
>