This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Atlas clones the Ajax of Rails late and poorly Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

While Microsoft may have gotten the ball rolling back in the day, they certainly can't keep up with it any more. At PDC they announced Atlas: The Ajax framework destined to put Microsoft back in the game. But surely they didn't put their sharp shooters on the target. Atlas is a late, verbose, buggy, and under-whelming stab at catching up to yesterday.

It's obviously "inspired" by script.aculo.us and Prototype, but fails to deliver even the work-arounds for their own browser that the dynamic duo has been showing them how for a long time.

Thomas Fuchs, author of script.aculo.us and Rails core member, has documented their feeble attempt to clone the two-line auto-completion control from Rails with 23-paged(!) tutorial for .NET (danger, word document). If it wasn't so funny, I'd be worried.

Sam Stephenson, author of Prototype and Rails core member, has a similar story about another slight inspiration.

Why go through the trouble of recreating these two de-facto standards for Ajax development when you could have been part of the originals? They're even under the MIT license, for crying out loud!

Every Rails-inspired framework under the sun have already joined up behind the path we set. Heck, even MonoRail for .NET is getting jiggy with Prototype and script.aculo.us.

So come on, Microsoft. How about scrapping those black'n'white and tilted copies and join the open source community in improving the real deal instead? Not even .NET developers deserve this cruel and unusual punishment :).