It’s not their fault. Microsoft would like us to write both client and server code in .NET (e.g. Silverlight and ASP.NET). Sun (now Oracle) would like us to use Java applets on the client against Java on the server. We’re all using JavaScript on the client, but Netscape intended us to use it on the server too. Hardly anyone is doing that! Inconsistency between client and server languages can be a headache in today’s AJAX-oriented web programming world.

The now-popular Ruby language for Rails web development has dramatically more in common with JavaScript than PHP, C# or Java. This makes it very easy to code client/server interactions. Both Ruby and JavaScript allow the declaration of hash literals, unlike other languages, and this is a great way to create a data structure on the server to be passed by JavaScript to a library like ZingChart. You’ll see that Ruby hashes work nicely with Javascript hashes… mostly. Here’s my code for generating the ZingChart area chart from Ruby arrays. The catch: ZingChart javascript needs “-”s in identifier names (e.g. ‘background-color’), which aren’t allowed in Ruby. Ruby makes it easy to hack built-in functionality though, so I just made a double-underscore in a Ruby identifier translate into a dash when sent as a json string to javascript.

This Ruby controller code sends a JSON file to ZingChart to generate an area chart showing a financial portfolio history:

 render :json => {
       :graphset => [
         {
           :title => { :text => "Portfolio History" },
           :type => @graphtype,
           :stacked => @graphtype=="area",
           :chart => { :background__color => "white" },
           :legend => {
             :header => { :text => "Asset" }
           },
           :zooming => true,
           :series => series,
           :scroll__x => {},
           :scale__x => { :values => date_array }
         }
        ]
       }

It’s a bit of a hack, but the code is much cleaner than the alternative.