At the forge: RJS templates

The power of Ajax to fetch and run JavaScript generated by your server-side language. The past few months, I've written a number of articles in this space about JavaScript. This language, built in to nearly every modern Web browser, has now come into its own and is at the heart of a paradigm for modern Web development known as Ajax. Whereas knowledge of JavaScript was long an optional skill for Web developers, it has become a must-have skill, along with SQL, HTML, HTTP and CSS. One of the reasons for JavaScript's renaissance is the emergence of cross-platform libraries, which hide the incompatibilities that long plagued the language. For quite some time, programs written in JavaScript had to contain many if/then statements that looked at possible cross-platform incompatibilities. Today, we can avoid having such if/then statements in our code by using libraries that take care of these low-level tasks for us. Prototype and Dojo, two of the JavaScript libraries I profiled in previous columns, have become popular precisely because they hide many of these details. They make JavaScript a truly cross-platform language, where “platform” means the Web browser as much as the operating system. Some clever programmers, in an effort to make JavaScript standardization even more complete and effortless, have gone one step further. Why not use your server-side programming language to generate the JavaScript for you? That is, if you are using Ruby on Rails, perhaps you could write commands in Ruby and have them translated into JavaScript. Doing so would allow you to use roughly the same code in all of your templates, without having to switch syntax in different parts of the template. This might sound like a strange idea, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. RJS (short for Ruby JavaScript) templates are one incarnation of this. If you prefer to create your JavaScript in Java, you might want to look at the Google Web Toolkit, which is now available under an open-source license and has gained many fans in the Java world. This month, we look at RJS and how it makes life much easier for Web developers. Although I don't think that JavaScript will ever disappear, or that Web developers will be able to ignore it completely, technologies such as RJS mean that it might become something like machine code today—available and sitting at the bottom of the pyramid, but generally ignored by high-level programmers.