Links

RubyJS, a Ruby implementation in JavaScript, now goes mobile, and we're not talking about the HotRuby previously blogged about here

The new Microsoft Live Maps and Virtual Earth is released, with reports of the overhaul coming in that it's fairly impressive.

Use your Google account with OpenID, and the reasons why your killer app should already support OpenID.

Links

Advanced obfuscated JavaScript analysis
Advanced JavaScript Debugging Techniques (besides tips and techniques, also mentions tools like JSLint, Firebug Lite, Debug Bar, Fiddler, HTTP Live Headers, Web Development Header, and the IE Developer Toolbar)

and, also

John Resig's commentary (Embedding and Encoding in JavaScript) on the 14k media-loaded JavaScript implementation of Super Mario. John's blog always is on the cutting edge of JavaScript, you don't know what you're missing if you haven't yet rolled him into your daily feed reading.

Links

modules.js
Super Mario in 14kb Javascript

Ruby love in the browser

I'd heard of HotRuby before but thought it was merely a browser-based Ruby interpreter written in JavaScript. A second look at it, via John Resig's post yesterday brought this to the fore:

1. Script finds <script type="text/ruby"></script> tags and extracts the inline Ruby code from them.


2. The Ruby code is sent to the server via an XMLHttpRequest.


3. The server-side CGI script (in Ruby, using Ruby 1.9) compiles the incoming Ruby into its associated opcodes and serializes it into a JSON data structure.


4. The browser consumes the opcodes, translating it into JavaScript, and executes it.

Interesting, and according to John's post, this round-about approach still shows pretty impressive performance benchmarks.

To look at it from another perspective, we can also do browser-based Ruby with Silverlight, in the upcoming version 2 anyway. This would be managed Ruby code running on Silverlight's DLR, all on the (plugin-enabled) browser, without the round-trip that the HotRuby approach requires. I wonder how the performance benchmarks for such an approach, and how it stacks up against HotRuby.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine has been released, and from what I can see it's a complete hosted web application platform, not unlike AppJet. While AppJet uses JavaScript for server-side processing, Google's App Engine uses Python, and has its own data-store, complete with a SQL-like query language, GQL. It'll be interesting to see the first applications that come out on this platform.