In case you've been living under a rock (like me with over 1k unread feed items), the recent buzz in Web tech has been around Adobe's Apollo runtime platform, and Joyent's Slingshot. Now that I've watched both videos, and read Joyent's own post (instead of 3rd party reporting), I'm very pleased to observe the first steps towards realisation of vision (more with regards to Slingshot):

<p>Your browser does not support frames, but you can still read the &lt;a href='http://r9.sharedcopy.com/435cb'&gt;sharedcopy content here&lt;/a&gt;.</p>

A Rails VM! That comes complete with its own browser and desktop events (e.g. drag-drop). What a clever, clean way of doing Browser-Based Application! Kudos to the pretty package. Crossing my fingers that it'll live up to its expectation, and that client installation of Slingshot is totally seamless.

If the consistency in Rails directory layout and library arrangement can breed Slingshot et al... I can't wait to see what Rails RESTfulness will lead to.