Today I was having interesting conversation with a fellow web developer about some of the newer open source tools I have been looking into including SASS, HAML, and CoffeeScript. One question seemed pervasive in the conversation.... “Is this rails specific?”, HAML claims to work for PHP, ASP and ERB. SASS and CoffeeScript are compiled on save if you set listeners or just use the Textmate bundles, So i know they can work with any language. Also the “guard” gem assists in listening for SASS, Rspec, and coffescript changes.

In rails 3.1 most of the tools mentioned are now nice defaults in the gemfile. They are SASS, CoffeeScript, and Uglifier. Why no HAML? HAML is really just be a personal preference and has a learning curve to it. HAML is not for everyone, plus writing AJAX callbacks in HAML feels awkward to me. I always used both, HAML for HTML pages and ERB in the js callbacks. But then again writing a js callback for each view is also seems strange.

Backbone.js also looks like something to follow closely. Backbone.js a small framework to assist in handling all json posts and responses from the controller. One file per model/controller that handles all the js actions. It seems much more solid then knockout.js and is a welcome addition to most of my new projects.