Jaxer 1.0 released. Jaxer Pro 1.0 also available.
I am excited to announce that the 1.0 version of Jaxer, the free, open source Ajax server, has been released. If you like working with JavaScript and Ajax, you’re going to love Jaxer! This 1.0 release of Jaxer is the culmination of three years of work to deliver this first-of-a-kind Ajax server that embeds the Mozilla Firefox browser engine within a server and full JavaScript application framework so that you can use your JavaScript and Ajax skills not just to create web pages but also to create full web applications on the server as well.
If you can’t wait, download it now or learn more.
While Jaxer is the brainchild of members of the Aptana team who have been advancing it since Aptana was founded, kudos must also go to the developer community who has actively participated in Jaxer betas since early 2008 and provided much feedback that’s guided Jaxer development. Thus in many ways Jaxer is an Ajax server built by web developers for web developers. Jaxer was also created with guidance from members of our technical advisory board including Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Mozilla CTO, who helped us with insights to tune things and deliver initial performance benchmarks for Jaxer in the range of PHP and Ruby on Rails.
If you’ve already been using Jaxer you’re likely familiar with its database, file system and socket APIs and its ability to not only run JavaScript and process the HTML DOM at the server, but also to expose server-side functions to the Web such that a HTML page can call back to those functions directly from the Web page. Thus Ajax communications could not be any easier with Jaxer: You just write a server-side function, “proxy it” with one line of code, then call it from the Web browser as if that function were part of the web page. Jaxer handles the client/server communications, data transformations, and provides the client-side function with its return value (either synchronously or asynchronously).
Recently we’ve added even more capabilities based on community feedback. These including support for RESTful APIs as well as native support for JSON to supplement the E4X (XML for JavaScript) support that’s been there all along (thank you Mozilla!). The combination of these means you can easily create RESTful services that can be consumed by a wide array of Ajax applications, Web gadgets, Facebook or OpenSocial apps, and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight based apps since those support JavaScript too. Plus mobile devices like the Apple iPhone and phones from other manufacturers are nearly all supporting JavaScript and Ajax. As you can imagine we’re excited to see JavaScript become more and more the lingua franca of Web applications. It’s already ubiquitous on the client side and now you can use it confidently on the server side.
This introduction to Jaxer screencast shows you the Jaxer basics with some examples of using Jaxer’s
<script runat=”server | both | server-proxy” > settings.
Here are more examples of Jaxer in action:
- Integrating with a database and calling server-side JS functions from the browser
- Using Jaxer to securely communicate across domains and mashup information
- Creating RESTful data services with Jaxer
- Using Ajax libraries server-side to mutate HTML pages before they are served
- Using Jaxer to interact with the server operating system
- Easy file uploading
- Creating Server-Side images with Jaxer
Jaxer 1.0 is dual licensed. It’s available to all for free under an open source license or in its Jaxer Pro edition under a commercial license and support agreement from Aptana. Jaxer is available to try in various ways: It is included in Aptana Studio 1.2, can be downloaded standalone, and can be tried for free via Aptana Cloud, our elastically scalable hosting and application lifecycle management service. See http://www.aptana.com/cloud for details.
(Via Aptana Blog.)