[Web-SIG] Just lost another one to Rails

[Ian Bicking]

Greg Wilson wrote:
> * AJAX support (I think Rails' most compelling feature may turn out to 
> be the fact that it does more AJAX straight out of the box than anything 
> else --- they're definitely going to ride that wave)

My own take on this is that the web development community on the whole 
is still very uneducated when it comes to Ajax stuff, so it's 
intimidating.  Rails covers up a few details and provides some 
suggestions (e.g., a specific Javascript helper library), so it helps 
people get past the initial barriers.  But as Ajax becomes part of the 
normal web developer's toolkit, what Rails provides won't be that 
important.  I think things will change radically as actual Javascript 
developer communities start to come about -- right now they are uncommon 
and usually attached to other projects (like Rails or Nevow), but that's 
not driven by any technical issue, just by cultural issues (Javascript 
isn't the core skill for many developers).  I believe strongly that the 
future of Ajax needs to be backend-neutral.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org