<story><title>Rails is just an API</title><url>http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/rails-is-just-and-api-and-that-s-ok</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>lrobb</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The caveats in moving state to the client is that it&apos;s a huge perceptual shift for developers, with a steep learning curve.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective we&apos;re coming full circle back to client/server desktop apps... only instead of C++, we&apos;re doing it with js inside a browser container... I&apos;ve done ActiveX controls and Flash components... It&apos;s not that much of a stretch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hcarvalhoalves</author><text>Agree, althought I&apos;m not fully convinced the web is fit for &quot;web apps&quot;, or that even &quot;web apps&quot; make sense. At least not with current technology.&lt;p&gt;Developing apps to run on the browser still implies a lot of redundancy: you are forced to work with solutions that weren&apos;t created for interactive applications in the first place (HTTP, DOM), limited to one language designed by comitee (Javascript) and code reuse is minimal. Everything just feels hackish (at best) compared to native frameworks (e.g., Apple&apos;s Cocoa), and in the end it&apos;s hard to achieve good UX and compatibility.&lt;p&gt;I would rather see more people deploying native aplications with great UX backed by REST APIs than shoe-horning apps into browsers (which break the web).</text></comment>
<story><title>Rails is just an API</title><url>http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/rails-is-just-and-api-and-that-s-ok</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>lrobb</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The caveats in moving state to the client is that it&apos;s a huge perceptual shift for developers, with a steep learning curve.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective we&apos;re coming full circle back to client/server desktop apps... only instead of C++, we&apos;re doing it with js inside a browser container... I&apos;ve done ActiveX controls and Flash components... It&apos;s not that much of a stretch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nirvdrum</author><text>We&apos;re also taxing browsers more, while simultaneously trying to run on less-powered devices.  It almost defeats the point of a thin client.</text></comment>