Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Interview with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails and more



Last year, Steve Yegge posted about Rhino on Rails, his port of Ruby on Rails to the JavaScript language on the Rhino runtime. It garnered a slew of interest, and I have been wanting to talk to him in more detail about the project.

Fortunately, I happened to be at the Google Kirkland office and Steve graciously had time to spend talking about the framework. Steve is an entertaining chap, and manages to keep you interested with long blog entries, and did the same as I chatted with him.

In the conversation we cover the germination of the project, why Steve went ahead with the port, the side effects of JavaScript on the server, how Rhino will be implementing JavaScript 2 / ECMAScript 4 (with Google committing engineers to the project), the intent to open source RnR, and random thoughts from a language geek.

Give it a watch, and let us know if there are any other questions you would have liked to ask

13 comments:

  1. Is it possible to have a transcript of this interview, please ?

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  2. And mp3 version, please?

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  3. I hate podcasts that think they are upgrading from Audio to Video. Pick a format and stick to it!

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  4. Seconded - please please revert to audio.

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  5. If you want to switch to video do what some other podcasts have done and include an MP3 version (see Diggnation, DL.TV, ect.)

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  6. Drop the suffix "Rails". You could get sued.

    Grails used to be called "Groovy on Rails" until the founder of Rails complained to the founder of Grails.

    See http://www.nabble.com/Groovy-on-Rails-is-no-more-%28kind-of%29-to3672535.html

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  7. I don't see a place to report bugs about the Google Code site, so I'm forced to comment on it here:

    All Google Code pages contain an infinite Javascript loop that eats up CPU cycles (about 4-10% on a Pentium M 1.7Ghz) even when idle. This degrades overall system performance and I can't leave any Google Code page open in my browser.

    This has been a problem since November, when the new CMS was rolled out.

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  8. Thanks, Alex. That's a known issue caused by a polling technique (well, a hack) that we use to support the back-button for certain AJAX requests on some browsers. We have an improvement in the works that should mitigate the CPU hit.

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  9. ok this may not relate at all, but i was wondering if google maps can make it easier to enter a 'bee-storm' of pushpins. i'm searching for real estate and have a HUGE long list.mapquest beta now lets you enter in 10 addresses to get most efficient trip. i just want to enter in hundreds of pushpins and i'll figure out the best trip from there.
    they currently are in excel but i can take that into word and remove table, & use commas to separate address, city, state, zip
    i am not a fast typist. so after entering about 6 or 7 and tagging info to each and timing it....it was WAY too much time.so i quit and tried mapquest beta.better, but not so good.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. you should check helma
    http://dev.helma.org/ seems close to what you are trying to achieve and definitely a project worth google endorsement

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  12. As interesting and cool as this is, surely someone at Google recognizes that all of this work, creativity, and energy was spent BECAUSE he had to hack around the language policy.

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  13. Thanks, Alex!

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