So what’s up with these Ruby on Rails posts?

NOTE: This post first appeared on my "ataraxissoftware.com/blog". It has been re-created here because that blog is going through a transition and the archive may be lost. This post will have a permanent home here. (The post has been back-dated to the original post date.)

If you’ve been following me since the beginning, you know that I was developing my first application (that I just recently canceled) in Java/JSP/Spring and OpenLaszlo. I want to fill everyone in on the technology direction and thoughts that Jeff and I are leaning toward.

Jeff had experimented with Ruby on Rails a few months ago and said it was a really nice framework. We’ve all heard the hype about it… I figured since this is a new project I should keep my mind open to developing it in a technology other than Java/OpenLaszlo. I’ve been reading through the Agile Web Development with Rails book by Dave Thomas. I’m very impressed with what I’m reading. (The book starts out as a tutorial, so it’s very code-intensive. So I’m really getting to type a lot of Ruby and .rhtml code.)

While I still love the syntax of Java, and the Spring Framework, Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework just seems like it would be so much more productive. I don’t think Ruby on Rails is doing anything radically new. The Rails MVC framework is very similiar to Spring MVC, but there are a few key differences that make Spring MVC big and scary (but I love it) and Rails dead simple. (I’m not going to tell you what those key differences are right now because it’s late and I’m getting tired. ;))

(Just for reference, here are my RoR posts so far: link 1, link 2, link 3).

At this point I’m pretty sure we’re going to be using RoR for our web application.

So have I left OpenLaszlo in the dust? I was one of the few people out there blogging about OpenLaszlo. Honestly, I’m not sure. One of the beautiful things about OpenLaszlo (or the upcoming Flex 2 for that matter) is that I can write a component in OpenLaszlo “LZX” and compile it down to a standalone .swf (Flash movie file) file. Which is great because I can embed them into HTML pages, and the .swf file can communicate with the browser’s JavaScript and/or to a server via SOAP web services or XML over HTTP (REST style web services).

I’m pretty sure that we’re going to be using regular HTML and *gasp* JavaScript for our GUI. BUT in those situations where we don’t want to write something in JavaScript we can always use OpenLaszlo or Flex to build a self contained component that embeds seamlessly (to the user) into the GUI.

Or heck, we may use OpenLaszlo for the entire front-end like I was previously planning. Or not. ;)