Ajax: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Chapter 14. Traveling Farther with Ruby If you're one of those developers who has never ventured outside the world of shrink-wrapped software, you've probably never heard of Ruby, the programming language I introduced in Chapter 13, "Tr...

14.1. Data Types Data types in Ruby aren't the data types that you're used to from the more traditional languages, such as C, COBOL, or Pascal. Because Ruby is purely object-oriented, you won't even find the primitive data types available in Java,...

14.2. Variables Ruby supports a couple different types of variables, instance variables and class variables. Instead of making you guess whether their names actually mean what they say, I'll just come out and say it. The names mean what they say. ...

14.3. Operators Regardless of the language, there is usually some commonality. There's addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and assignment. In some languages, including Ruby and JavaScript, the addition operator does double duty as the...

14.4. Flow-Control Statements In any type of nontrivial program, flow control is possibly the most important factor in programming. Without some kind of flow control in programming languages, computers would essentially be very expensive desktop o...

14.5. Threads Ruby has a feature that every language should have: the capability to multithread. Personally, I'm fond of forking a thread whenever something that I'm about to do is time consuming. For instance, any kind of input/output operation o...

14.6. Ajax All this discussion of Ruby leaves us with only one question: Where the (fill-in-the-blank) does Ajax fit in? Well, remember Rails from Chapter 13? That is where Ajax fits in, but for me to prove it, we have to generate another controll...

14.7. Summary In this chapter, we lightly touched upon the Ruby programming language, a subject that could take an entire book in itself. We pointed out the fact that Ruby has no primitives and that all variables are, in fact, objects. The numer...