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I was following the Behavior discussion on the Rails mailing list and this post about Nitro caught my eye.

the ajax infrastructure in Nitro transparently uses behaviour.js along with prototype / script.aculo.us to fully separate javascript and xhtml code. Have a look at www.nitrohq.com and the included ajax (preview) example.

So I took a bit of time to read through Nitro’s introduction. It does sound a little interesting. After only a brief introduction, it seems perhaps simpler and less structured than Rails, slightly more focused on “web sites” rather than “web applications”. The idea is that web sites frequently start off as just HTML, but then you want to add little bits of functionality. Nitro allows you to work with the HTML files, creating controllers automatically based on the presence of XHTML files, then add bits of Ruby in for functionality as needed as it grows.

Sounds kinda like how PHP got started. Not sure if that’s a good thing though. One thing I think really benefited Rails was being extracted from an already built and refined application.

Regarding the Behavior discussion, I can see the argument that the way Rails does it is fine, totally functional and less problematic as well as very quick to implement. But is seems the only argument for not moving the Javascript to something more like Behavior is just that somebody would have to the write code. And I do find stuff like this intriguing though, from their release notes :

Nitro fully separates the behaviour from the template using the behaviour.js library and allowing for dynamic injection of ajax functionality. The generated code contains clean html and all the javascript organized in a single script block.

Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff going on with Ruby and Rails, more hosts announcing support for Rails, people switching from other platforms. I’d say if you’re going to start learning a programming language today, all these things make Ruby a wise choice.