Rich web applications and sites deliver great value but are hard to develop, deploy, and maintain. The client side of the application or site requires careful coordination of complex DHTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The Aptana Studio IDE is designed to greatly ease the client side of this pain. But there is another difficult aspect to Ajax-style ("Web 2.0") applications: the server side. The developer must be an expert not only in a rich set of browser technologies and libraries, but also in a completely different set of paradigms on the server: a templating framework for emitting the HTML as a string, a different language such as Java or PHP or Ruby, and a variety of ways to communicate between the server-side technologies and the web client. And these client- and server-centric technologies must be woven together into a seamless, flexible, maintainable product. If this isn't done right, the results are poor performance, excessive network load, difficulties measuring and monitoring the user experience, and constant headaches.

Jaxer, the Aptana Ajax server, directly addresses these difficulties. Jaxer offers a unified development model, in which the developer can continue to use exactly the same well-known paradigms from the client — JavaScript, the HTML DOM, and CSS — on the server, without requiring any other server-side technologies. The server and client sides of the application or site can communicate easily and intuitively without any extra technologies to learn and incorporate. JavaScript functions on the client can simply call JavaScript functions on the server to fetch database information or, if needed, access back-end Java business objects and network resources. The DOM can be prepared on the server using the same Ajax libraries that will be used on the client when the page is delivered. The result is a much simpler and more efficient development process that lets web developers focus on using Ajax technologies to deliver value. Indeed, an entire rich web application can be written in a single HTML document. Since Jaxer is based wholly on established web standards, there is no reliance on proprietary markup or protocols. Applications and sites can now be built purely on Ajax technologies end to end, or Jaxer can be used for just the presentation layer (both client and server) on top of a business logic layer in, say, Java or PHP. Jaxer fits comfortably within most IT network configurations: it comes with Apache so it can function as a full web application/page server, and it can be integrated into an existing web server farm, or it can be deployed as a proxy for maximal flexibility, for example post-processing an existing outbound HTML stream.

As a post-processor, Jaxer can be used to intelligently instrument the outbound HTML stream for monitoring performance and user experience and behavior; to optimize the application (for example by aggregating JavaScript and CSS files to minimize network delays); to enforce security and compliance requirements; and even to add new capabilities that were not designed into the original application. This is made possible because Jaxer understands the DOM, JavaScript, and CSS as natively as a browser. Jaxer is built on top of the Mozilla engine, the same engine used by the popular Firefox browser. Jaxer affords an extensible and future-proof platform for building dashboards, optimizers, and compliance filters for use by IT and marketing organizations across multiple legacy web applications. The knowledge gained can then be incorporated into new web applications and sites — developed more efficiently using Jaxer.

Chapters

Below are the chapters in the "Book of Jaxer". Please select a chapter from the side menu or the menu below.