[dstein]

The biggest problem is the technology stack is too tall. With Ruby on Rails adding Jquery, Coffeescript, SASS, and SCSS it's exposing some obvious shortcomings in today's web frameworks.

The high level problem is that web developers are trying to do things (state) in web browsers over a protocol (HTTP) that was not designed for it. Every server-side web framework is always going to be Frankenstein-ish like RoR has become.

Meta-frameworks may start to become necessary. There's a few out there like Haxe, and GWT is sorta one. Websockets may also start to become a more widely used alternative to Ajax. HTML and JS are going to be a problem for a while, but can maybe be abstracted almost completely.

[sunchild]

"Ruby on Rails adding Jquery, Coffeescript, SASS, and SCSS"

Eh? None of those things that you listed is for emulating state over HTTP. In any case, Rails is supposed to be a "tall" stack – it's supposed to be a highly opinionated framework.

If you want to attack stateful apps in browsers, aren't Sproutcore/Cappuccino better targets?

[dstein]

Using Jquery to do ajax requests and updating part of a web page is emulatimg state over http.

Coffeescript, SASS/SCSS are just examples of making the Rails stack even taller.

I don't have any experience with Sproutcore or Cappuccino but both look like clientside-only frameworks and would only extend the state & stack problems that I already dislike.

[sunchild]

"Using Jquery to do ajax requests and updating part of a web page is emulating state over http."

Only if you use it that way. Also, Sproutcore/Cappuccino are not add-ons to Rails. They're stand-alone client-side frameworks.