What is Aptana? What is Jaxer? What does this have to do with JavaScript? Let me fill you in if you never heard these two words in the JavaScript community before.
First, what is Aptana?
Aptana Inc. is a company founded by Paul Colton back in 2005 (Paul created JRun back in the day). The company’s first product is an open source JavaScript IDE called, you guessed it, Aptana which is based on the Eclipse platform. The IDE name was recently changed to Aptana Studio. It’s a pretty popular product that many JavaScript developers use. There are about 1,321,900 downloads to date according to counter on the Aptana website.
Ok, now what is Jaxer?
Jaxer is the latest product from Aptana. It is “The world’s first Ajax server”. Basically its an application server that speaks JavaScript. This means you can code your entire web application (front and back end) using JavaScript, HTML & CSS only! Aptana Jaxer is also an open source project licensed under the GPL. The JavaScript and DOM engine is the same one used in Firefox 3 (Mozilla). This means you can write your code using the latest JavaScript specs (1.5 to 1.8).
Cool! Now how will this change the game?
Are you kidding me? In my career as a web developer (since 1998) I’ve written code in VB, Tango, Perl, ColdFusion, Java, PHP and a bunch of unheard-of proprietary languages. The only programming language I’ve used in all my projects is JavaScript. Imagine a world where you don’t need to worry about all those other server side languages. Who needs Ruby on Rails? Why not use the most popular programming language on the web?
Now I know its a bit early to dump server languages like Java, PHP and ROR. Jaxer is still in beta (v0.9) and they just released a version for Linux. So we still have a long way to go but since this is all open source, I really hope the see it take off. I plan on doing my part so look out for future articles about applications I’ll be porting over to Jaxer.
Read more about Jaxer at http://www.aptana.com/jaxer
