Thanks Shriram, I understand your point of tiered vs tierless, and agree that the reality is not really that "single" after all.  I only have a couple more questions: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> > It is the same thing.  Given that you know what's going to be on the > client and what on the server, how do you produce each part?  For the > client, I recommend Flapjax.  For the server, we are working on this > RoR competitor.</blockquote><div>  RoR also includes the ajax stack, which scopewise equates to Flapjax.  Would your RoR competitor encompass Flapjax in the future?  I suspect no since you firmly distinguish between the two, but just want to confirm </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> That's what "tierless" means.  You write a single program that gets > compiled into several different languages running in different places, > such as SQL on the db, Java on the server, JS on the client.  But in > practice this "single language" is not so single after all: you often > still have to annotate what lives where, you may have slightly > different APIs depending on location, and you often have to write the > db access code in a very stylized way so that the compiler to SQL can > produce good SQL code from it.</blockquote> I suspect that you have better tricks in your sleeves than the above approach for your RoR competitor... true/false?  Perhaps we will hear more when you are further along on your project ;) Thanks, yinso