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.
Rails & Instiki vs. Dreamweaver
I know, silly comparison. They're entirely different tools. They both, however, are used to create web sites. And with both tools at my disposal, I'm surprising myself with ways I can use "Rails":http://rubyonrails.org/ to make my life easier.
Instiki featured on IT Conversations program
"IT Conversations":http://www.itconversations.com/ has "a program":http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail467.html about using "Ruby":http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and my favorite wiki, "Instiki":http://www.instiki.org/ in schools. Initially the students write their papers using Instiki, the teachers use it to provide feedback. The developers have taken it a bit farther with "SchoolTool":http://www.schooltool.org/ which uses some semantic web ideas and the "Zope 3":http://www.zope.org/DevHome/Zope3 web application environment. It's a centralized student administration program that they've meshed with Instiki in an interesting web-services salad kinda way.
Ruby is fun
I spent my free time last weekend working on the my little app in "Ruby on Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.com/ . I'm only a novice programmer at best, so my experience at learning Ruby is likely different from someone that has another language down pat. But for me, Ruby is just fun. Part of it is the quality of learning I feel like I'm doing. I fee like the things I spent the most time on are things that ended up being one very brief line of code in the end, and also things that will apply to more than just that particular problem.