RailsConf Talk Recap

There was a great turnout at the jQuery talk at RailsConf yesterday (packed house!), mostly not jQuery users, but hungry for an alternative to Prototype.

At the session, I explained what I thought were some seminal differences about the way jQuery works as opposed to using built-in helpers:

• jQuery prefers passing data -- not code. In other words, a jQuery-friendly action will pass back JSON data, to be processed by a jQuery callback, while RJS (Rails' preferred method), sends back code to be executed by the client. Sending back data makes for a skinnier pipe needed to accomplish the same thing
• Unobtrusive thinking is incompatible with Rails helpers that are dumped in the middle of views. Even going the UJS4Rails route, requiring code to be inserted in the views that they refer to violates unobtrusive principles and mashes together behavior and content (even though the CLIENT sees the code separately, UJS is a design philosophy, not a compile-time philosophy).
• Using server-side JavaScript (RJS) leads to a reliance on the server to maintain state (or at least, a reliance on the server to tell the client what to do), but many RJS'ers end up making extra trips to the server to compensate for their lack of client-side code
• Rails works exactly the same as any other server-side framework from the perspective of the client. From that perspective, requests are made of the server (via Ajax) and responses are returned. Rails can make returning responses saner via respond_to and to_json but it's fundamentally a communication that can be easily understood in a server-framework-agnostic way.
• Last but not least, it's worth your time to learn JavaScript even if you've been putting it off. Learning the basics of jQuery shouldn't take more than an hour, but it'll be an hour that'll free you from having to worry about how someone else implemented a JavaScript helper and bring you closer to a saner design philosophy

Again, I'm really happy about the turnout at the session and I hope to be posting more about Rails as well as the release of jQuery on Rails real soon :).