Browser, meet Ruby on Rails

24 Jul 2008

John Lam is announcing a bunch of good IronRuby stuff at OSCON today, mainly around the project's commitment to open source. Part of this commitment is being able to collaborate with the Ruby community on projects that are related to IronRuby. This is where I fit in. :)

At RailsConf John Lam and I gave a talk about IronRuby, Rails, and Silverlight. We showed IronRuby running Rails, as well as the beginnings of an integration between Silverlight and Rails. I've hinted in the past about this very thing, but RailsConf was the first time I got to show it to working to actual Rails developers. Pretty awesome. Today, I get to share it with the world:

 

silverline is a Ruby on Rails plug-in which gives the ability to run Ruby in the browser to manipulate HTML, vector graphics, or just do some computation. Bottom line: it let's you write Rails code that can run on the client.

Check out the website: http://schementi.com/silverline.

And, most importantly, you can download the plug-in from github: http://github.com/jschementi/silverline.

Also, you can submit bugs/feature-requests on lighthouse: http://silverline.lighthouseapp.com

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This is all possible because of Silverlight, the 4 megabyte download of the .NET Framework, and IronRuby, the implementation of Ruby on .NET and the Dynamic Language Runtime. silverline lets you do anything you can do in Silverlight with IronRuby, but it's a first-class part of your Rails application, and makes things a whole lot easier.

watchtryruby

To see silverline in action, take a look at the demo site: http://silverline.schementi.com. The source is located at http://github.com/jschementi/silverline-demos. I will be posting walk-throughs of silverline's features shortly. Enjoy!

Note: "silverline" might not be the name of this thing in a couple days, so if you see something else on my blog that seems the same but has a different name, then it's the same thing.

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