An under-the-hood look at Backpack

Yeah, Rails suffers a syndrome of "You can only do these predefined things, in this way", but they're covering more and more ground in terms of what you can do.

I predict faders will be a big thing in the near future. People fading colors from one state to another state depending on the context, and fading expansion and contraction of objects on a page, instead of sharp, sudden transitions. Implementing them in Javascript by hand is not fun, so the addition of that to RJS will be great.