I also always wanted to play with Rudy on Rails but then that met learning other language, Rudy. Don’t get me wrong its good to learn multiple computer languages, but its to find the time. Now a JavaScript version of Rails thats more productive. I always though JavaScript should be everywhere. Most programmers either know it or can pick it very quickly and it is very portable. So this is some great news and very cool project that could take the web development world by storm.

Quotes from Christoph Zumbrunn:

Steve Yegge says that quite a team inside of Google has gathered by now, investing their 20% time into future Rhino development. Very Cool! I think that’s probably the best news about the whole story – because on the Rails port side of the story, it seems he didn’t really address the most interesting part, ActiveRecord, and they are instead planning to go in the direction of Hibernate.

He makes it clear that the project is not at a stage where it could be open sourced, and that that won’t change much for at least a year. It looks like they will keep their eyes open for Rails-ish web frameworks of the likes of Helma.

Quotes from John Lam:

One of the first talks that I went to at Foo Camp was called “Google Rails Clone” by Steve Yegge. With a title like that, how could I resist?

Google uses four different programming languages: C, Java, Python, and JavaScript. Apparently, nobody likes writing web front ends in Java, not even Google who has a lot of web front end code in Java.

In an effort to increase developer productivity at Google, Steve tried to convince the company to adopt Rails and consequently Ruby as a programming language. When that fell on deaf ears Google really does not want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure, Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. Working 2000 hours. Steve is a coding stud.

It runs on top of the Rhino JavaScript engine that runs on the JVM. He also fixed some bugs along the way, and tightened up security considerably lesson: working with your security organization in the early stages of a framework, even a port, saves you tons of time and pain later. You can see how Steve became rather enamored with JavaScript, when he proclaimed that it would become the Next Big Language.

Sources:
John Lam on Software: Steve Yegge ported Rails to JavaScript
Rhino on Rails – zumbrunn.com/mochazone/Rhino on Rails/

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