Interesting lunch discussion

I had the good fortune to accidentally sit down to lunch at a table with David Heine­mei­er Hansson of 37Signals and lead developer of Ruby on Rails and Rich Kilmer of RubyForge who had begun a discussion of the things you might expect, Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and the like. Then Phil Windley (who has some excellent posts about a couple tutorials here at eTech) and Rohit Khare of CommerceNet Labs added to the mix some discussion of microfomats, JavaScript, and some ideas that definitely push the envelope of what those things have traditionally done such as, mini-ml and some JavScript talk during which I was treading water so it wouldn't go over my head. Finally, fellow Minnesotan, Dan Grigsby of SiteGoFaster infused some more energy into the ruby on rails discussion as it eventually turned to a preview of David Heine­mei­er Hansson's tutorial about how with Rails 1.1 (coming this weekend?) you can create great AJAX apps without writing a single line of JavaScript.