Microsoft’s Latest Bad Idea? ARAX – Ruby-powered AJAX

By Peter Cooper

Microsoft's got plans for Ruby beyond the fine IronRuby project in the shape of "ARAX" (Asynchronous Ruby and XML), a Ruby-flavored variety of the popular AJAX Web development techniques. Microsoft's Silverlight plugin will be able to process and run Ruby code that's directly within Web pages similar to how browsers process JavaScript. This allows Ruby developers to write Ruby code instead of the equivalent JavaScript as they do now.

eWeek interviewed John Lam, creator of and program manager for IronRuby, to find out more about the project. Lam seems to feel that Ruby developers aren't happy with using multiple languages and dealing with context shifts:

[A]t some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself. So there's always that sense of, 'Now I'm in another world. And wouldn't it be nice if I have this utility class I wrote in Ruby…' Today if I want to use it in the browser I have to port it to JavaScript. Now I can just run it in the browser.

On the other hand, though, he seems to have no issue with HTML and CSS:

It's a known thing and people understand this technology. The part that [is important], at least as far as Rails programmers are concerned with, is they would like to be able to do some Ruby on the client. JavaScript is no longer the ugly stepchild that it used to be, but it's quirky in certain ways. That's not to say that Ruby isn't, but Ruby has more 'oohs and ahs' about it than JavaScript does.

Naturally, the success of this idea rests on the success of Silverligh, but it remains to be seen whether Silverlight will take off. Silverlight's dynamic language support is exciting and innovative but whether it'll actually prove worthwhile to developers in the long run is doubtful. Microsoft already seems to have enough issues with .Net 3.x (.Net 3.5's runtime is a 190MB download - almost an operating system in its own right!) and IE 7 adoption on the operating systems it actually controls updates for.

An amusing part of eWeek's article was a fine shot across the bow from David Heinemeier Hansson:

It's great to see Microsoft making progress on IronRuby. Just like JRuby provides people who are stuck with an inventory of Java infrastructure and programs an easy way into Ruby, so does IronRuby for those who are still sitting on a Microsoft stack. As with JRuby, though, I don't expect a lot of Ruby programmers with no existing connection to Microsoft to go gaga over it.

Let's just cross our fingers and hope it doesn't become another proprietary rehash (JScript, J#) and that Silverlight isn't abandoned or dumbed down on non-MS platforms (as Internet Explorer, Media Player, Messenger and Office were or are).