derek gulbranson

Nitro, Another Reason Ruby Is Worth Learning?

I was following the "Behavior":http://www.ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/ discussion on the "Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.com/ mailing list and this post about "Nitro":http://www.nitrohq.com/ caught my eye.

the ajax infrastructure in Nitro transparently uses "behaviour.js":http://www.ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/ along with "prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ / "script.aculo.us":http://script.aculo.us to fully separate javascript and xhtml code. Have a look at "www.nitrohq.com":http://www.nitrohq.com/ and the included ajax (preview) example.

So I took a bit of time to read through Nitro's introduction. It does sound a little interesting. After only a brief introduction, it seems perhaps simpler and less structured than Rails, slightly more focused on "web sites" rather than "web applications". The idea is that web sites frequently start off as just HTML, but then you want to add little bits of functionality. Nitro allows you to work with the HTML files, creating controllers automatically based on the presence of XHTML files, then add bits of "Ruby":http://www.ruby-lang.com/ in for functionality as needed as it grows.

Sounds kinda like "how PHP got started":http://no2.php.net/history. Not sure if that's a good thing though. One thing I think really benefited Rails was being extracted from an already built and refined application.

Regarding the Behavior discussion, I can see the argument that the way Rails does it is fine, totally functional and less problematic as well as very quick to implement. But is seems the only argument for not moving the Javascript to something more like Behavior is just that somebody would have to the write code. And I do find stuff like this intriguing though, from their "release notes":http://www.nitrohq.com/view/Release_notes :

Nitro fully separates the behaviour from the template using the behaviour.js library and allowing for dynamic injection of ajax functionality. The generated code contains clean html and all the javascript organized in a single script block.

Anyway, there's "a lot of stuff going on":http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/000812.html with Ruby and Rails, more "hosts":http://planetargon.com/ "announcing":http://blogs.eng5.com/~agreenfield/2005/07/12/rolling-on-rails-at-site5/ support for Rails, people "switching":http://socialtwister.com/archives/000548.html from other platforms. I'd say if you're going to start learning a programming language today, all these things make Ruby a wise choice.