Yeah, so I think I'm a bit late to be jumping on the band-wagon, but I've had a chance to play with some other web technologies these past few days. The first is another RIA toolkit from Google called Google Web Toolkit (real creative name!) In case anyone out there didn't know, GWT compiles Java code into XHTML/CSS/Javascript to create a rich UI for the web. When I first looked at it, back in 2006, my initial reaction went something like “uuuuhhhh...okay!” I actually got down into it and created a few sample applications/applets, it worked quite well. Google provides a pretty extensive Java library to create all your UI widgets and such things, and other third-party libraries, like GXT (Ext-GWT, a proprietary system actually. Yuck!) provided another layer of widgets and UI styling that really creates an even nicer interface. But for all of that, I still prefer Adobe Flex. MXML provides a much nicer language for constructing the UI and (I may be speaking too boldly here) I think Flex is much easier to style. In addition, Actionscript 3 is a much more forgiving language to develop in than rigid Java. But that's just me. GWT does still have its advantages, in that the user doesn't have to wait for a flash swf to load, but I don't think that's too much of an issue for a well-designed applet/application/widget.
The other technology I've been playing with is Ruby on Rails. I first looked at RoR back in 2005 (I think?) and I loved Ruby (it reminded me a lot of Scheme, and Scheme is my favorite) but I was pretty resistant to using a web applications framework, and had a hard time deploying my applications on Apache, so I never really had anything more than a passing interest. But since its been so long since I've really dived into a new web technology, I thought I would try it out again. This time, I was able to get it working with Apache without much problems (using mod_rails.) Whats more, I'm really enjoying writing web applications in a language with all the expressive power of Ruby (it's far superior to PHP, and again, more like Scheme, except without the parentheses.) In fact, I've decided to use Ruby on Rails to develop an application for one of my clients, GetMyCloset (an undergrad-startup lead by a young entrepreneur at the University College London) and we should have a public prototype up soon!
