Jaxer 1.0 is packed full of new, exciting stuff and we are proud to announce Jaxer 1.0 Release Candidate B. This is our first pre-release of Jaxer 1.0 to the general public and we are looking forward to more feedback from the Ajax community. Jaxer 1.0 RC B has more features and capabilities than the prior Jaxer betas, and we're calling this a release candidate because the APIs are now pretty much set for what we'll have in the final 1.0 release. So it's a great time to get started with Jaxer 1.0. Aptana Cloud users and nightly build users are still on Jaxer RC A until updates for those are released (soon).

Jaxer 1.0 RC B is available both within Aptana Studio 1.2 (also just released) and as a standalone server. All are open source. The Studio download is suggested if you are new to Jaxer since Studio includes many helpful features to getting started with Jaxer including a fresh batch of Jaxer 1.0 samples.

Download Aptana Studio with Jaxer 1.0 RC B — or — Download Jaxer 1.0 RC B server.

This release contains many new and enhanced features including:

• Application context settings that allowing for easier app configuration, app properties, database settings, etc...
• Database API enhancements with richer APIs for working with result sets.
• Server-side image manipulation including server-side canvas support and ability to convert to other image types.
• Native command execution API so that you can run system commands and handle the output from those.
• Asynchronous server-side JavaScript processing lets you implement callbacks in your server-side code too.
• Ability to return custom content types (e.g. json, xml, gif, html, etc...)
• Full control of the request/response lifecycle including setting redirects, headers, content, etc...
• Secure sandbox supporting cross domain calls, sandboxed JavaScript execution, META refreshes, ...
• Serialization support for JavaScript objects to and from XML, E4X and JSON

I'm really excited about the ability to return custom content types (json, gif, xml, html, etc...), particularly the JSON type since the server-side is natively JavaScript. What could be easier — especially with the enhanced serialization support for JSON. And with the E4X (native XML for JavaScript) capabilities in Jaxer, returning XML types is now a piece of cake too. This means that you can now easily use Jaxer as a JSON or XML service provider not just to Ajax clients, but also to things like Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight which can consume JSON or XML and support JavaScript and XML on the client as well, a technique useful in mashups and all types of social and mobile apps.

The new secure sandbox lets you load, on the server, pages from other domains and allow their JavaScript to execute without giving them access to the Jaxer API or your own server-side code, but still giving your code access to their window objects and anything inside them. While you can't see these windows (they're on the server) you can use them programmatically whether you're consuming web pages in mashups or generating them to be sent to the browser. Uri Sarid's blog has a nice example using these to do "DOM Scraping" where you actually can execute the JS functions of the page you're consuming on the server, access its DOM and get what you need for your mashup or app. Since Ajax is so prevalent today in web pages, being able to trigger the Ajax events server-side such that the content added via the Ajax calls is available in a server-side DOM is very handy in this case and could be applied for things like search engine optimization and accessible modes for web apps as well.

Get all the details of what's new and what's improved in the Migrating Jaxer Beta to Jaxer 1.0 doc.

Jaxer 1.0 docs are in process, links to which can be found at the Jaxer Developer Center.

We'd love your feedback on this release and your thoughts on where Jaxer should go next via the Jaxer forums.