[Rails] Spring-rich killer: rails rich-client proposal

[Jon Smirl]

Build the front end with XUL runner
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner

XULRunner is a single "gecko runtime" installable package that can be
used to bootstrap multiple XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as
Firefox and Thunderbird. It will provide mechanisms for installing,
upgrading, and uninstalling these applications.

Build the back end with RoR and WEBrick and run it on the local
machine. Use HTTP to talk to it.

The big advantage to XUL runner is that a year from now Firefox will
be a XUL runner app too.  That means that anyone who is running
Firefox will already have your GUI run-time installed.

On 1/31/06, Joseph Graham <jgraham at majikoz.com> wrote:
> It seems that a project like this could accomplish the following:
> * Provide an abstract means to bind to one or more native GUI tookits
> * Provide a data binding mechanism to link controllers to GUI events and
> link model objects to fields and GUI widgets.
> * Provide a stub to one or more reporting engines that would allow one to
> send models from the GUI context to report templates.
> * Provide a client-specific plugin capabilities that would allow people to
> implement plugins to solve domain specific problems such as login and
> authentication.
> * Integration with a  deployment strategy such as JNLP or some native
> installation mechanism (i.e. Super-pimp installer).

You can already get all of this with XUL runner. Note that the
components in XUL ( http://xulplanet.com/references/objref/ ) can be
controlled by any language with XPCOM bindings. That includes C, C++,
Javascript, Java, Python. You don't have to build everything with
Javascript.

You could even use Ruby to control XUL if someone wrote the XPCOM
bindings for it. It's not very hard to do. It looks like someone has
already started: http://rbxpcom.mozdev.org/

--
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com