Any chance that ruby could be used on client side?

Question

For scripting on web browsers, the only option now is using javascript.

I wonder if Ruby ever could make it to the web browsers?

It's highly unlikely cause MS doesn't have any reasons for letting Ruby to become first class citizen, wouldn't that be bad for their current platform? I don't know how Apple sees it.

If Ruby can't be first class citizen in the browsers, how likely is it that a add-on could be installed on the browser, letting the browser execute Ruby also. In that way, we programmers could just use Ruby instead.

Answer 1

No one can tell the future, but I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Browser vendors aren't likely going to want to support multiple client side scripting languages (see the death of VBScript in the browser). Javascript fills the client side niche already so there's no reason to vendors to introduce a new language just so that there is an alternative syntax. 3rd party plugins aren't really a good solution either because users get no benefit from installing it (unlike something like Flash which can offer functionality that HTML/Javascript can't).

There are some Javascript libraries that try to emulate a Ruby style of coding -- for instance, JS.Class.

Answer 2

Your best bet is probably a "language converter" like: http://rb2js.rubyforge.org

Honestly though I would just bite the bullet and learn Javascript. A plug-in could be created, but it would never catch on: businesses won't inconvenience their customers just so that their programmers can use the language of their choice.

Answer 3

It may not be in the near future or it may never be implemented as the browser scripting language. But people are playing around with that idea. Check out rubyinside.com, they seem to have a working demo. The last time I checked the demo page crashed the browser :( But don't loose hope yet ;)

Answer 4

It's not exactly using Ruby as a replacement for Javascript, but you can run Ruby on Silverlight (and Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Silverlight).

Answer 5

I don't like JS that much. For a scripting language its way too much verbose, it suffers from bad design decisions that got into the ECMA standard... It has however some nice features which make it unique and powerful.

I wish the web was more agnostic with client-side languages, but its very unlikely, sadly.

If you want something that feels like Ruby you may try CoffeeScript. You write your code in CoffeeScript which then gets turned into JavaScript. It borrows a lot of ideas from Ruby and Python which makes a great mix.

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

I am personally enjoying it very much.