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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...

Dion Almaer already straddles Google, where he works, and Ajaxian, where he blogs. And as an early adopter (think first few hours) of Jaxer, he's already brewed cool examples of server-side Ajax. Since he's been talking to the Gears team internally to Google, he's now put together an example of using the same DB API on the browser and the server.

Yesterday we released version 0.9.2 of Jaxer, and in it you'll find that our Jaxer.DB.ResultSet now supports the Google Gears resultset API natively, in addition to its more JavaScript-y API. You can read more about these in the Jaxer DB documentation page. So Dion's example can probably be simplified a bunch now.

But what will be even more interesting is tying together client-side persistence with server-side persistence. Imagine e.g. that going off-line grabs your data from the shared database on the server, you get local persistence as needed, then going on-line syncs your data back to the shared database. The same code works on both, and could detect whether you're offline or online and just "do the right thing." No doubt this is just the beginning...

Mark McLaren, has blogged about EXSLT in FF3 and Jaxer, he's even written some Jaxer samples.

A how to guide on integrating Jaxer with Apache Tomcat has been released.

This guide walks you through how to enable Jaxer to post-process your HTML and JSP pages for your Tomcat web applications. The tutorial includes two WAR files, one that adds support for Jaxer callbacks on your Tomcat pages and the other includes samples on possible ways to integrate Jaxer with your JSP/HTML pages.

Jaxer also has a connector available for the Jetty HTTP server which is used inside Aptana Studio.

Please use this forum thread to discuss the Jaxer-Tomcat connect

Jaxer lets you use your full stack of Ajax technologies — HTML, JavaScript, DOM manipulation, XHR, etc. — on the server, to make web application development a lot smoother and more natural.

But Jaxer is also based on the Mozilla engine, in fact on the same core that will power Firefox 3, just without the rendering. And this simple fact unlocks a lot of power that's been built up over many years by Mozilla developers. Unless your apps and sites have targeted Firefox exclusively — unlikely, given its market share — they could not rely on JavaScript features beyond version 1.4. And how about the numerous extensions that have been developed for Firefox, some of which actually ship with the browser? Most developers don't even know about them, and they couldn't rely on them being available to most of their target audience.

But now all that Firefox 3 goodness is under the hood of your Jaxer, on the server side, under your full control. So if JavaScript 1.7 and 1.8 generators, iterators, and array comprehensions float your boat, then happy sailing. Soon native JSON parsing and encoding will be available, along with other features on the march towards JavaScript 2. Perhaps more significantly, you have a rich SOA stack: SOAP, WSDL, and other four-letter friends from the enterprise architect's bestiary. Microformats, anyone? Simply use the script loader to import the built-in Microformats.js and you have access to hCard, hCalendar, and other functionalities. XSLT transformations are at your fingertips by just "new"ing up an XSLTProcessor object. There are all sorts of hidden gems to discover: did you know there's a very nice RDF subsystem in there? How about base64 encoding and decoding? Try typing for (var p in Components.classes) { print(p); } in the Jaxer Shell to see that we've just scratched the surface of what's available.

Of course, if you don't see something you need, you can always just build it: think server-side GreaseMonkey scripts on steroids. I can't wait to see what people will come up with, now that all these capabilities are free from their browser dependence. There's already been a number of cool examples on various blogs, and we'll start to roll out more on a regular basis. More importantly, we'll make it easy to share your own samples and snippets with the community. Stay tuned...

Wow, it’s been a long road getting to this release date, but I am very excited and proud of our team, and I'm happy to say that today we released our beta 1 of Jaxer -- what we believe to be the first true Ajax Server product.

So what is an “Ajax Server”? Simply put, we unify the development model for Ajax developers. That is, write “Ajax” code client AND server. The same APIs, the same JavaScript, the same HTML and best of all, manipulate the DOM on the server.

What does all that mean? It means that you can do a getElementById() and set its innerHTML on the server side just as easily as you can on the browser. You can write a single JavaScript function and share it between browser and server. You can write server functions which can be transparently called from the browser -- synchronous or asynchronously.

If you’re a beginning Ajax developer and any of that sounds complicated, it’s not. It simply means you can now build an entire Web 2.0 application, client and server, using only the Ajax technologies you love.

I asked several of the leaders in the Ajax space to join with us and with you, the Ajax community, in defining where we go from here. I’m very honored to say that we’ve got an all-star group assembled as our Aptana Advisory Board, just take a look at this who’s who list.

We’ve placed a few screencasts online so you can take a quick look at what Jaxer is all about and how you can start playing with it right away.

Send us your feedback, your suggestions, and tell us what you are building. After all, building a free, open-source product ultimately means we’re building this for you!

Regards,
Paul Colton