Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

If you’re a web developer, then hopefully you’ve already heard of Ruby on Rails and Ajax. If not, you’re behind the times, and you have some reading to do. New in Rails is built-in Ajax support.

I haven’t had time yet to play with Rails yet, but I’m itching to do so. Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby, an odd, interesting programming language (probably only ‘odd’ to me because I haven’t used it yet). Rails excels at making database operations nearly transparent. And since most web applications revolve around databases, this speeds development greatly.

Ajax is really just a new name for something that’s been around for a while. It’s just that it finally got a catchy moniker that people could latch onto, plus a couple of high-profile real-world applications: GMail and Google Maps.

I have a feeling that we’re going to see an explosion of interesting new “rich interface” web applications soon…