Ruby the programming language has been around for quite a while, though quite popular in Japan, it never made any inroads into the mainstream of computing. Only recently it made quite a splash with the emergence of Ruby on Rails (RoR) as an alternative web application framework. Yet it still remains stuck in the peripherals, with Java and .NET dominating the corporate computing space. A sad fate indeed for probably the best dynamic object oriented language in geek lore.
But Ruby's fate is about to take a detour, with the upcoming Ruby IDE from CodeGear (the company formerly known as Borland, then Inprise, then Borland again!) and suprise surprise - Netbeans 6.0. The latter has a preview download while the former is still vaporware.
So will Ruby finally become mainstream and pose a threat to java and c#? I will probably have an answer to that after I have installed Netbeans 6.0. The problem is, I might enjoy it a lot and decide to never look back.
I found this library while researching the web for an alternative AJAX solution for ASP.NET sans Javascript. The thing is, if you know how to use those built in WebControls, then you already know how to use Gaia since most of its widgets mirror those found in ASP.NET. The window and autocompleter controls are very impressive.
Gaia makes the Ajax toolkit from Microsoft look ummm ... outdated. See for yourself here.