Move Over, AJAX, ARAX Is Here

Microsoft promotes Asynchronous Ruby and XML development.

Move over, AJAX; Microsoft is pushing a different scenario, known as Asynchronous Ruby and XML, or ARAX.

At the RailsConf conference for Ruby on Rails developers in Portland, Ore., on May 30, John Lam, creator of the IronRuby project at Microsoft, told eWEEK that as Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application environment takes off it will provide Ruby developers with a way to deliver AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-style applications without having to use JavaScript.

"If you're a Ruby programmer and you like Ruby as a language, context-switching into JavaScript is just something you have to do," Lam said. "It's a tax. You're trading productivity away arbitrarily because that's just what runs in the browser. And it's much more interesting when you can run the same language on both sides [the client and the server] so you don't have to do that context switch."

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-ken