thirdbIT

Oh, man. AJAX.

So I’m working through the canonical rails text, Agile Development in Rails, and I’m breezing along, thinking “this rocks!” The last web app that I wrote, back in 2002-ish, was a Java/JSP thing, with some web services thrown in, toward the end. I had some exposure to Ant, JUnit, and the other open-source tools people were starting to use then, but not a lot. STRUTS was still bleeding-edge.

Anyway, so that web app I wrote at Millennium, for the Mol Path department, was an enormous undertaking, at least for one not-very-experienced developer. Legacy code, legacy database, ties to 5 or 6 other systems, disgruntled and demanding users, the works. I worked my ass off on that app, and most of the functionality of most of the code I wrote is now provided, from the start, in Rails. I’ve been breezing through the rails tutorial, excited as all get-out to think how much more quickly one can develop web apps with rails. It’s all awesomeness.

And then I get to AJAX. And I cringe. Because ye gods, I hate javascript with a fiery passion. I hate the DOM. And yet, if I want to write code, and I do, desperately (I’ve done doc-only gigs, and it’s not my favorite thing), then I’ve got to know the DOM. I have to fiddle with the CSS, make the shopping cart update on the fly, zoom the links, and all the rest.

Why is javascript still around? Why doesn’t someone, you know, standardize it? Why can’t it work the same way in all browsers? Why does IE have a “quirks mode”? I have long been convinced that javascript was invented to drive programmers insane. It looks sort of like a programming language, but actually it’s voodoo. I know with Rails I get to stay pretty far away from the actual javascript , thank goodness for small mercies, but still, not as far away as I’d like to be. And again, why is javascript still around? Still around, and used more now than EVER?? Grrr.

Still and all, Rails is damn cool.