There are some interesting threads going on in the Aptana Forums about using Aptana Studio with Adobe Flex and Flex Builder. The idea of using Ajax and Flex or Flash together is not new. Google Finance did a great job a few years ago blending the two to provide a very nice user experience with Flash-based interactive charts within an otherwise Ajax UI.

It seems that the Aptana community is uncovering increasing efficiencies in using Aptana Studio and Adobe's Flex Builder together. We've also known that many Adobe AIR users are building their Ajax apps for AIR using Aptana Studio, and have heard from others that using Aptana Jaxer to create JSON data services (written natively in JavaScript) consumable by Flash and Flex apps makes a lot of sense as well. Flash and Flex each have an "Ajax bridge" to expose JavaScript APIs for the embedded objects.

Anyways... It seems Adobe is now actively taking a deeper look at this trend in the hybridization of Ajax and Flash and Flex. I saw that they are offering $75 bucks for an hour phone call to discuss your experience with and thoughts on using these together.

Here's the link if you're interested: http://www.adobe.com/go/RIAintegration_study/. $75 bucks... That's almost the cost of a tank of gas in San Francisco.

Rich Waters of Ext JS has put up a great example of using Ext JS server-side with Aptana Jaxer. Check out the example and from there get the full source code to give it a go yourself.

"We can see that Jaxer lets developers leverage the hard work which has already been spent building client-side libraries on the server-side. These simple examples show off some of the true potential of utilizing the Ext JS framework on the server-side" says Rich.

The easy to follow example shows off a very simple wrapper around an Ext.data.Store and the corresponding Jaxer server code that returns JSON to a Ext JS datagrid.

A new Aptana RadRails book has been released. Aptana community member Javier Ramirez's "Aptana RadRails: An IDE For Rails Development" (Packt Publishing, May 2008) is now available. Find it at Amazon, or direct from Packt (where its a tad cheaper it seems), or at other fine book establishments around the world!

Here's the summary:

A comprehensive guide to using RadRails to develop your Ruby on Rails projects in a professional and productive manner

• Comprehensive guide to using RadRails during the whole development cycle
• Code Assistance, Graphical Debugger, Testing, Integrated Console
• Manage your gems, plug-ins, servers, generators, and Rake tasks
• Rails 2.0-ready
• Includes a chapter about Subversion and Database integration
• Smart Code Assistants for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Aptana RadRails is an Integrated Development Environment for Ruby on Rails projects. Built on top of the well-known Eclipse platform, RadRails provides all the tools you need to create a whole Rails application from a single interface, allowing you to focus on the creative part of the development as your IDE takes care of the mechanics.

What you will learn from this book

This book will show you how to use the tools RadRails provides to improve your productivity:

• Tools for writing code: Specialized Editors for Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; >> Code Assistance; Code Completion; Refactoring; Quick Code Navigation; Outline Views
• Tools for testing and debugging: Unit Testing; Graphical Debugger; Monitoring of Log Files
• Tools for project management: Specialized views for launching your Tasks and Generators; Management of your Gems and Plug-ins; Rails Servers Control
• You will also learn how to use other Eclipse plug-ins for synchronizing your projects with Subversion and for managing your databases.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Ruby on Rails developers who want to make the most of the framework by using an Integrated Development Environment.

Even though the book explains everything you need to follow the contents, the focus is on how to use the tool and not on the Rails framework itself, so previous working knowledge of Rails is highly advisable. Previous knowledge of Eclipse is not necessary.

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Author: Javier Ramírez

Javier Ramírez has been developing Web Applications since before the term Web Application was coined. Born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1974, he started programming as a hobby around the age of 11 assisted by his older sister. A few years later, he got his first modem and became a regular of BBSes and Newsgroups. His interest in developing server applications that can be accessed remotely comes from those times.

He has learned —and forgotten— many programming languages, including Basic, dBase III, Cobol, Pascal, SQL, C, C++, ASP, TCL, JavaScript, PHP, and Java, the language on which he has focused for most of his career so far. He has held the positions of programmer, analyst, consultant, team leader, post-sales engineer, project manager, and software architect, totaling over 12 years in the IT business.

Having developed projects mainly for banks and other big corporations in Spain, Italy and the US, he co-founded some years ago a small software development shop, which provided him with valuable experience about the difficulties and the joys of entrepreneurship. After two years, he left the company in pursuit of new professional challenges.

For the last two years, he has been proudly working for ASPgems, where he discovered Ruby on Rails, which soon became his framework of choice for developing Web Applications. He is one of the organizers of the Spanish Rails Conference, also participating as a Speaker in the two events held so far.

He has also been an instructor on Robotics, Java, FatWire Content Server, and Ruby on Rails, and a University Lecturer in the subjects of 'Software Engineering' and 'The Java Programming Language', which he currently teaches at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, in Madrid.

Javier Ramírez holds a B.Sc. in Business Information Systems with First Class Honors and a degree in Ingeniería en Sistemas de Computación.

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Javier's other postings in the Aptana forums

Aptana will build off of its IDE and AJAX success with its new technology. Read the full story.
Learn more about Aptana Cloud, an "Elastic Application Cloud" that's ideal for Web developers who use scripting languages.
Join the early access program.

Tony Issakov has written up a nice conceptual article on how Aptana Jaxer can simplify certain tasks of dojo and dijit development. He starts with a simple case of how Jaxer can enable simplified server-side dijit markup, then expands the ideas to JSF, JSTL, and templates. Tony explains: "Once upon a time dojo had markup ability using custom tags. This was pulled because as it turns out, some browsers just scrap tags they don't understand. One browser that did support tags of a non HTML nature though was Mozilla and in turn we get this freedom back via Jaxer." For example: <div dojoType="dijit.form.button" label="test"></div> can become... <dijit type="button" label="test2"></dijit>

Here's some picks from the blogoshpere, We have a real nice write up on using MySQL with Jaxer from the viewpoint of a php developer, penned by our own inimitable Ian Selby. JavaScript & MySQL, A nice insight into accessing the wonderful world of Java from Jaxer by Joe Walker Jaxer to Java, and some coverage of our our recent RadRails 1.0 release.

Lee Provoost at Capgemini just learned about Jaxer, and he's challenging us to set up a Jaxer Pet Shop. OK, that's the kind of challenge we love, so of course we'll take him up on it. Especially because we don't want his heart to stop beating for too long:

"Yesterday, I bought a new Apple computer and I was happily installing and configuring my Eclipse environment and of course the must-have for every web-developer: Aptana! One of the big problems with JavaScript and Ajax programming is that there are barely good development environments. Syntax highlighting can be handled by most IDEs, but when it comes to complex code completion and assistance, nothing can beat Aptana as far as I know. You can either install it standalone or as an Eclipse plugin. So I surfed to the website of Aptana to get my plugin, but suddenly I stumbled on Aptana Jaxer. What caught my I was the following sentence: “Jaxer, The world’s first Ajax server”. My heart stopped beating, my whole (young) life passed by and I was thinking: "gosh, I thought I’ve seen it all…""

In fact we're thinking of building two pet shops (neither of which will ever sell any real pets unless they're of the Tamagotchi variety, btw):

1. One that's end-to-end Ajax, showing how much simpler it is to develop Ajax apps when you can stay in one paradigm, and giving some ideas of how to architect full-fledged Jaxer apps;
2. And one that's built on top of a Java Pet Shop, perhaps leveraging the DWR integration to Java we're now working on, to show how you can easily have the best of both worlds: the strength of an enterprise Java app with the engaging user interaction afforded by Ajax. We'll see how you end up with increased security and a clean division of labor between business logic in Java and the user-oriented application flow in Ajax (on both client and server).

Actually, we'll probably just build the first iterations of these, and then solicit the community's help to define better application infrastructure for Jaxer. People are already working on some ORMs for Jaxer, so I'm sure there will be some exciting conversations.

Dion Almaer blogs about the latest update to his gears integration with Jaxer

Here are some blog entries posted from some of the early adopters of Jaxer.
Kritikal on Linux
Peter Svensson

When Google Gears first came out, people were excited to see simple, powerful DB access in the browser. Now with Jaxer offering Ajax on the server, there's some very interesting client-server straddling to be done...