Ruh Roh, Scooby - Here Comes ARAX

Ruby (with or without Rails) - looks like it's getting a Microsoft-sponsored update in Silverlight that will allow it to have AJAX-like interaction - sans the JavaScript.

Right now, if you want to have AJAX type of functionality - you can still do it within Ruby - although most developers use RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility to write Ruby and then have RJS generate the JavaScript code for execution in the browser.

Ummmm.... right. If you're going to have a client-code dependency like Flash - it seems to me that it's probably not a good idea to be beholden to Microsoft. I mean, the whole reason people use Ruby is because it's open source and cross platform - right?

So... if people lean on Silverlight to be the client-side goo to execute these AJAX calls - what happens if Microsoft decides to only update the Windows version, and allows the Mac and Linux versions to fall behind (feature-wise)? Not that it's happened before with... ahem... Office for Mac or anything...

While I think it's a good idea to help developers of all languages bring it to the browser, I'm not sure this strategy is all that it's cracked up to be. Plus, I really don't see this group of heavily Unix (including loads of Mac developers) group relying on technology from the Evil Empire to solve their coding woes.

It would be good, though - if the major browser makers (or some astute, cross platform, named vendor - e.g. Adobe) would built-in support for such a scheme.

If they did - then we could have a whole new crop of acronyms: APhAX (PhP), ACFAX (ColdFusion), ALAX (Lasso), ANAX (.NET)...

Let's just stop the insanity here. There will always be languages that are not ECMA scripting. In fact, ALL languages except JavaScript are different. Let's face facts: JavaScript is here to stay - and even becoming 2.0 (soon according to Brendan Eich the guy that made it up back in the Netscape Navigator days).

It's really all up to the browser folks - and hopefully they'll all just agree to support the same stuff, the same way. The last thing in the world we need is a new generation of browsers that are even MORE incompatible.