Backpack brings Ajax into Rails.
Backpack is the third application from 37signals that’s now available online. Just like Basecamp came birth to Rails itself, Ta-da
drove great features like caching, Backpack has been the main driver
for a lot of interesting developments in Rails. Most visibly is the
incredibly strong support for Ajax interfaces that Rails now sports.
The
innerHTML approach with server-side fragment rendering was developed
specifically for Backpack and has now been extracted for general use in
Rails. It’s joyful to see that the Ajax integration in Rails has caught
the interest of so many developers and 37signals is especially thankful
for the work of people like Sam Stephenson, Thomas Fuchs, Sean Treadway, and others.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking advantage of even more of the Ajax innovation happening in Rails, such as the upload progress indicator
and the Google Suggest-style searching. In the meanwhile, do checkout
Backpack as the currently best example of the wonders of Ajax in Rails. [Riding Rails]