Hpricot wishes

[leslie]

I'd much like a Reggy-style (http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/
2007/02/16/reggy/) real-time preview of Hpricot queries/transforms and/
or Firefox/Firebug extension integration.

WebKit on Windows (Swift, as well) isn't quite beta-ready, but I'd
still like to get Ruby into the browser somehow, whether it's JRuby as
a FF extension or CRuby mixed with OS X WebKit somehow. Any thoughts?

~L

[weepy]

maybe this could help ?

http://rb2js.rubyforge.org/

it's limited but you could get something basic going ?

[weepy]

or in fact this :

http://po-ru.com/diary/convert-ruby-to-javascript/

[Leslie Wu]

I remember hearing about that, but forgot about it -- thanks for the reminder.

One discussion I've been having lately, with myself and others, has been: "is multi-language webdev here to stay?".

My gut reaction is yes, but have been reflecting on what the industry at large has to say.

If you watch something like "Theory of the DOM" -- http://www.webstandards.org/2006/10/18/video-presentation-douglas-crockford-on-the-theory-of-the-dom/ -- you'll see folks talking about how people go to great lengths to not write JavaScript.

On one extreme is something like GWT -- which we note Google does /not/ dogfood -- which translates Java into AJAXy JavaScript. Moving toward the center we have libraries like YUI, which are ostensibly written JavaScript but (some say) don't quite taste like JS code.

Also near the middle fall things like Markaby or Rails + Scriptaculous, where you write Ruby but HTML or JS comes out the other end.

AJAX -- or to make Håkon happy, AJACS -- to me also seems to blur the distinction between client and server somehow, and perhaps AJAX has been what has brought JavaScript closer to server-side culture (also c.f. JotSpot jot:script, a trend not seemingly followed) and Ruby closer to client land (Rails for webdevs).

Firefox 3 might support DOM/offline storage, and they're thinking hard about cross-domain XMLHttpRequest and mashups too (I bet). I'm not sure I see JavaScript making much inroads into server-land -- maybe that's why JotSpot has been so quiet all these months, having to answer to Googly Java+GData-yes-REST+JSON-no Engineers.

I'm not sure why Douglas Crockford's module proposal hasn't gotten more press -- http://json.org/module.html -- maybe the server guys are still waking up slowly to the JS world, or maybe we just realize that browsers are used so widely that cross-cutting innovation might not happen there without a fight.

I think I might contend that if we want Ruby to earn its place in the webdev world, < module > might not be a bad place to start. JavaScript is just too global as it stands, and Ruby has mindshare enough to wedge its way right in.

FF3, Gran Paradiso, is a tempting hack, but WebKit (OS X, the Windows port isn't quite there yet, where are you Adobe-Apollo-code?) might be easier to hack. Or maybe mouseHole plus a FF3 extension might be better still.

Okay, I think that was a useful brain dump for me, to air out all these bubbling thoughts.

~L