Redshift: A GWT for Ruby developers ?
By dgirard on Monday 10 November 2008, 14:23 - Permalink
The all-new Red is a Ruby-to-JavaScript transliterator backed by a custom ruby.js library designed to let your code run in the browser exactly* the way Ruby would run on your machine. The JavaScript output is optimized to contain only the fraction of the ruby.js source library needed to run your code.
What does this mean for today’s Ruby developer? Simple. You don’t need to learn JavaScript.
Comments
A flattering comparison, to be sure. At this point, with Red and Redshift having been developed by just me and one other developer, I assure you that GWT is a far, far superior tool in terms of stability, performance, and optimization; that said, I will obviously welcome recommendations for how to improve Red/Redshift from the perspective of GWT users. Thanks for the writeup!
And with an interesting comment by trek from the original post :
" It would be breath taking to step into the minds of the average Ruby developer. Tell me, what is it about Javascript that causes your tails to fall between your legs? This is yet another attempt by your average narrow minded Ruby novice who wished Ruby was the only thing we should have to know. WAKE UP !
I have just finied up a 6 month Rails project at a client where RJS was seriously enforced because javascript “was so terrible”. It’s ironic that Ruby programmers promote beautiful clean code, yet don’t see that their partials/templates turn into a hog mess of sloppy helper/rjs methods.
Do you want to solve a real problem? Figure out how to bridge client server ajax apps, not hide such an amazing language because you guys just cant do it.
"
Christian - That's not me who made the comment, it's by "jay smith". Clearly, as one of the developers of Red/Redshift I think it's a fine idea.
I really think GWT is great because it participates in refactoring operations and static type checking in the IDE, which reduces the number of errors in the code during development and maintenance. Not learning javascript is secondary, minor benefit - javascript isn't very hard to learn.
Ruby doesn't (as far as I know) support refactoring or compile-time checking so the javascript compiler is not particularly exciting. I was previously using and contributing actively to pyjamas, which was a Python to javascript compiler and I made the realization that it's really quite pointless - these dynamic languages are similar enough that you're almost at a disadvantage using the translator since you can't use the various (rather good) javascript libraries out there (like jquery) as easily.