I have been a long time follower of Steve Yegge and his long blog entries that manage to keep your attention. He has the opposite style to me (I know how curt and bad my writing style is!), so I envy it a little.

Ever since he presented on the ‘Google Rails Clone’ at FooCamp and posted about the internal Google Rhino on Rails project, people have been curious to learn more.

What does it mean to port Rails to JavaScript?

What can’t you do since JavaScript doesn’t have the same meta programming facilities?

Rails = a group of Active*, so did you re-implement everything?

What do you gain out of having JavaScript all the way down?

Does it actually make sense to have jjs ? Server side JavaScript generating client side JavaScript? Argh!

? Server side JavaScript generating client side JavaScript? Argh! What is the state of Rhino?

Will Rhino support JavaScript 2?

How does the JVM help you out?

What are the ramifications of implementing ActiveRecord with Hibernate

Fun other languages to play with

And of course, the big questions:

When do I get to see it!

I happen to be in Seattle at the Google offices, so I was able to ask all of these questions and more. Steve was a fantastic host, and I really enjoyed chatting with him.

This is the kind of video I want to explore at Google. We have many great developers working on cool technology. I want to get them on camera, participating with the community when I can. Sometimes we can talk about products and APIs, but sometimes we will talk about fun ideas and projects that we are working on such as Rhino on Rails.

Anyway, give it a watch and let me know what you think: