Obie Fernandez wants No Ruby in the Browser, after Paul Hammant discussed it in Ruby vs. JavaScript for Web 3.0.
I am actually a fan of JavaScript these days. It isn’t as evil as you think.
However, I would love to have Ruby integrated as well as JavaScript it.
We could then have true libraries, and if we could version them all within the browser etc, we could share them between apps so we don’t duplicate painful downloads (not that we can’t add this to JS, but we could use rubygems).
Having true packages and namespaces, and a full environment like ruby in which we can share code in both worlds would be great. No need for Ruby to JSON etc. Send Ruby on down.
The reality is that it would be hard to get the ball rolling. JavaScript is part of the majority of browser suites, including the Flash VM, and getting groundswell around a Ruby plugin would be tough.
But in another dimension Marc A put Ruby into Netscape and we are all happy.
January 10th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
You would really need something with built in security like the JavaVM. It would be awesome if you had a callback that gave you the DOM for the page and let you manipulate it. You could then use JRuby, JPython, or even just Java at that point. It always surprised me that applets didn’t have this capability…
January 11th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Replacing JS with a generic interpreter would be cool. The JVM would be great, but anything that allowed multiple languages to replace JS would work for me.
January 19th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
You can get your ruby on in the browser already… to a limited extend. See www.kavascript.com.
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:34 pm
It doesn’t provide everything you’re asking for, but my new javscript library/framework (yajaf.blogspot.com) does incorporate a packaging / dynamic code loader component. I think it’s one of the things that makes mine different and I’m considering opening it up. Alas, I can’t seem to get enough interest in it. I’m looking for interest and feedback from potential users to see if I should finish my developer tool.