I haven't written here in a while. My plans for exploring new frameworks were either put on hold or accelerated by a change of leadership at my job. The new leader wants to enact a radical change of technologies, which I very much support. It looks like I'll be doing Ruby and Rails for the forseeable future, and while I'm fine with that, it's such a learning curve that I don't think I can spend time (at least any time soon) exploring the Scala-based frameworks I was interested in. Maybe I'll head there someday, but for now, I think I'll switch gears here and start using this venue to help further my reacquaintance with Ruby and my acquisition of the new Rails stuff. It's been years, and a lot has changed.
Ruby is good. It's far better than Java, and while I don't like it as much as Scala, it will do. It is flexible and supports some of the more functional style I'm interested in.
Javascript? Nothing's changed there. I'm still very interested in exploring the current state of the industry (as outlined very well in this page) concerning rich Javascript frameworks.
So, my plan is now to write a game using Rails and one or more of these Javascript frameworks or libraries. I still want a very separate client and server, which might involve only serving JSON or something similar.
One more thing: a framework I have recently been playing around with is Node.JS. I started writing a test application in Node and succeeded in downloading an xml file, converting it to JSON and serving it to a page. I put it on Heroku here. This is a very interesting and understandably controversial (anti-) framework: concise and powerful yet so different from the monoliths I'm used to. It gives you very little and expects little from you. It was interesting and I think I'll do more with it if I get a chance, but for now I'm leaning toward not using it for my app. I'll probably post more on Node at a later date.
