I think you're discarding the enthusiasm of others too easily. You seem to imply that they are misguided in seeing a use in RJS when you don't.
It seems like I didn't manage to get my point across. What I was hoping to express is that I can see the enthusiasm, but do not understand it, so I am thinking there might be a point that I am missing. That's why I wrote the post after all. If it was just to complain I could have saved my time and do things differently myself, after all, I do have an approach that I am happy with myself for the moment.
But when so many people think it's a good thing, it a least deserves to be looked at more deeply, I think. So I was hoping for people to contradict and - unlike your expectation - your post was very much what I was hoping for and I hope there will be others.
And if you are telling me that one of the main reasons behind RJS is that people prefer to not write JS, then that explains the enthusiasm and it helps me in taking my own decision that I personally don't need RJS. So honestly thanks for that!
I am not trying to say MVC is good, because it's MVC. It's the same reasoning as above: I see it used very widely by many people, I have used it and until now always to my advantage. What we do and think is a result of our experience, I guess. So far I have made good experiences with MVC, so I believe it's a good thing. I haven't heard strong arguments against it yet, but if you have any, I am more than happy to hear them. I am keeping my JS out of my HTML, because it makes it easier to reuse code, I can apply the same behaviour to different markup. I can simply link in a JS file to an HTML file without having to touch any of the markup at all. I can even move my JS between projects using different platforms. It doesn't matter whether the server part of my web app runs on php, rails, some java framework or whatever. They can all statically serve the JS file and it will work as long as they produce the same markup. Also it makes it easier to debug using Firebug when I have a single clean JS-file and don't have to jump around between HTML-tags and JS- files. Finally I like it when things are cleanly separated.
but I'm convinced that your arguments don't pull their weight there.
Same goes here. If you do have any arguments, it'd be nice of you to share them. It's exactly these arguments that I was hoping for.
First and foremost, your arguments suffer from absolutism.
Only for the sake of simplicity (of my statements) and to call for counter-arguments. Maybe I overdid it a little this time. Thanks for replying in spite of that, Michael!
Stefan