[Web-SIG] Just lost another one to Rails

[Martijn Faassen]

Ian Bicking wrote:

[snip]
> 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.

I've observed fairly closely the evolution of Kupu (kupu.oscom.org) over
the last couple of years. The Kupu developers are exactly as you
describe; an actual Javascript developer community. They originate in
the Zope world in this case and thus are Python hackers (which is a good
start for Javascript, as Javascript is like a badly broken Python, which
is a compliment to Javascript :), though they're not *attached* to it --
Kupu is backend-neutral and used far outside the Zope context.

A nice article about Kupu appeared recently on onlamp:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/04/28/kupu.html

The Javascript world is nice currently as it isn't so filled up with 
actual developers yet, though is rapidly changing. A competent developer 
who writes Javascript can do stuff that few people have done before 
fairly easily, just by applying knowledge from, say, Python development.

Regards,

Martijn