Aptana RadRails 1.2 is now available. In addition to making it even easier to get your Rails environment set up and configured, for new and expert users alike this release makes deploying and updating your Rails apps to scalable servers via Aptana Cloud Connect as easy as a few clicks. Watch this 4 minute screencast.

What's new in Aptana RadRails 1.2?

Easier to get Rails set up and configured (especially on Windows).
Since setting up Rails can be confusing to new users (and time consuming even for the most experienced), we’ve added a wizard that helps you get standard Ruby installed as well as RubyGems. For Windows users, the wizard will even get and run the Standard Ruby One-Click installer for Windows for you.

Streamlined Rails app deployment and updates via Aptana Cloud Connect.
Pick a Rails project, then choose Deploy to a New Site, Deploy to Staging, or Deploy to Public. Then RadRails and Aptana Cloud Connect do the rest for you. RadRails 1.2 automates setting up all the integration points, installs the necessary gems, and executes the proper deployment commands for you. And as always shows you in the console all the commands so that you can do them manually or use them in your scripts. Checkout the screencast to see for yourself:

Preparing for Eclipse 3.4 compatibility.
The release also lays some plumbing that will be useful as we move towards using Eclipse 3.4 as the platform for future releases. This primarily means that some debugging functionality that only worked in Studio 1.2 (based on Eclipse 3.2) will now work in Eclipse 3.3+ and in the next major release of Studio when that comes out.

And more...
To view the full changelog for the release, go to http://support.aptana.com/asap/browse/ROR/fixforversion/10082. Note that this is for 1.2.0. In fact, we just pushed a 1.2.1 bugfix release which fixed one major and two minor bugs introduced in 1.2.0.

Enjoy!

-- Chris

As of today, March 24, 2009, anyone using Aptana Studio as a plugin to Eclipse can deploy Java apps to the Cloud via Aptana Cloud Connect. Aptana Cloud Connect integrates Aptana Studio/Eclipse with your cloud hosted Java apps. It lets you instantly put Java projects and apps into to the Cloud, then manage those apps though development, staging/testing and production cycles. Right now, you can also try the Java service for free.

Java developers and teams can easily get started with new new projects without the headaches of setting up hardware, installing software, or configuring networks (or waiting in line for the IT department to get around to your request). As this short screencast shows, you just click the "Deploy to Cloud..." button and in about 2 minutes you've got resources provisioned, complete with Tomcat, mySQL, source control and more all ready to use and integrated right into the IDE. This makes Aptana Cloud Connect ideal for web projects that use Servlets, JSP, JSF, Spring, or other Java web technologies that can be packaged as .war files. And once an app is deployed, allocating more RAM or storage to scale the app is as easy as dragging and dropping a slider. For apps architected to run across multiple machines, private IP addresses in the data center provide for speedy network connections.

The combination of Aptana Studio's popular HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Ajax development capabilities, Eclipse for JavaEE development, and Aptana Cloud Connect for integration with application hosting and life-cycle management services accelerates time to use for new application, reduces costs, and makes the development process much more efficient. Since we released Aptana Studio several years ago we've seen more and more Eclipse users adding Aptana as a plugin to their IDE and using Aptana Studio's HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax capabilities in concert with their Java projects. Now those same Java web projects can go right into a cloud data center and be managed through the development, staging/testing and production life-cycle via Aptana Cloud Connect.

In addition to Java, Aptana Cloud Connect provides application hosting and life-cycle integration for Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Jaxer (the open source Ajax and JavaScript server based on the Mozilla Firefox browser engine).

How to get started?

There's a free trial so that you can check it out at no cost. All you need is Aptana Studio 1.2.5 (free, open source software) or later plugged into Eclipse.

Highlights

Here's a few of the key features of Aptana Studio and Aptana Cloud Connect for Java Developers

• Instantly provision servers running Tomcat and MySQL
• Work with their remote environments directly from their Aptana Studio perspective in Eclipse
• Get full root access, SSH and SFTP
• Collaborate with other team members on projects
• Tap into integrated Subversion or Git source control
• Migrate projects from development, to staging to production contexts
• Scale computational and storage resources up and down at will

What does it cost?

Pricing starts at $20 per month -- which includes all your hosting fees and bandwidth (unless you exceed 10 terabytes -- yeah...that's terabytes!). You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time. Fees are prorated to the hour so that you only pay for what you use. Aptana Studio is free, open source software.

A new version of the Adobe AIR Development Plugin for Aptana Studio has been released. Use this plugin to create HTML and Ajax apps for Adobe AIR. There's lots of great new things, but the highlight is the JavaScript Debugger integration with the Adobe AIR runtime. Now you can set breakpoints, step through code, watch variables, and simplify the whole debug process for the JavaScript apps you create for AIR using Aptana Studio. Check out the Debugging JavaScript for Adobe AIR screencast and the related article at the Adobe Developer Center.

What's new in this release?

• Support for Adobe AIR 1.5
• Integrated JavaScript Debugger
• Additional frameworks, JavaScript APIs and code assist for those
• Automated badge generation

Of course there's lots of very useful capabilities from the prior releases as well. We also want to say thank you to all the beta testers for this release. We've incorporated much of your feedback into this release and look forward to doing more in the future.

How to get it?

After you download Aptana Studio 1.2.4 (or update to it), follow these instructions to add the Adobe AIR Development Plugin for Aptana Studio.

More resources

• Adobe AIR Development Plugin for Aptana Studio
• Adobe AIR homepage at Adobe.com

We are excited to announce that you can now deploy your Ruby on Rails apps to Aptana Cloud's scalable servers using the latest version of Aptana Studio (version 1.2.3 or later). It takes just a few minutes to go live on Aptana Cloud. There's a free trial to help you get started or just check it out.

This Rails on the Cloud video shows just how easy it is to get a complete database driven application running on your desktop and deployed to Aptana Cloud's scalable servers.

Because we wanted the deployment processes to be scriptable, we based our solution on the popular Ruby deployment tool Capistrano. We wrapped Capistrano with our own Aptana Cloud gem to simplify the process of configuring Capistrano to work with your site, and plan on integrating the process more closely with the Rails utilities in Aptana RadRails soon.

We're here to help. If you need assistance or have feedback for us, visit our new Rails in the Cloud forum. We are especially looking forward to talking with new users about their experience and how we can continue to improve the service for their needs.

How to get started?

(1) Download or update to Aptana Studio 1.2.3 or later, and install the RadRails plugin.
(2) While you're doing that watch the intro video for Rails on the Cloud for an overview of the set up and configuration process.
(3) Next, create a new Rails site to Aptana Cloud via Studio. To do this right-click on your Rails project and select "Deploy to Aptana Cloud ...". The deployment wizard will lead you through the steps to set up your new hosted server.
(4) Set up your Rails environment using this guide.
(5) Deploy your Rails project to your new server.

We are excited to announce that the Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio is available in its 1.0 release. If you've not seen the Nokia WRT and the new Aptana Studio development tools for this environment, they are very cool indeed. They let you use your HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Ajax skills to create installable apps for mobile devices and thus tap into GPS, accelerometer, contact list, dialing and other native device capabilities (securely managed through user-granted permissions).

Nokia WRT has been out for a while and is today running on millions upon millions of Nokia S60 phones. The apps can be distributed through simple web download, bluetooth sharing, or even as email attachments making them ideal for both public and private use.

What's New?

What's new is the 1.0 release of the Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio. This plugin lets you create, test, preview and package feature rich mobile apps and widgets for Nokia S60 devices in the context of Aptana Studio's great code editing, code assist, Ajax library support, debugging and more. Whether you've been creating mobile apps already or are just starting out, the Nokia WRT plugin for Aptana Studio gets you productive fast.

Nokia WRT also lets you access network data when the device is online. Aptana Studio makes it easy to create such data services in a range of languages and even host them on leading providers via Aptana Cloud.

The Nokia WRT plugin for Aptana Studio adds:

• Library of ready to use Ajax controls (and you can use other Ajax libraries as well)
• Support for Adobe Flash lite
• One click app previews in context of various device profiles and aspect ratios
• Automated deployment packaging into .wgz files
• Deployment to devices for testing (via bluetooth) or Nokia's S60 device emulator for Windows.
• Sample applications with full source
• Code assist and docs for the Nokia WRT JavaScript APIs

This 8 minute screencast gives you the grand tour.

More information and resources can be found at http://www.aptana.com/nokia.

Download or update to Aptana Studio 1.2.1 or later, then open Aptana > My Aptana > Plugins, find the Nokia WRT Plugin in the list and click "Get It"

jQuery 1.3 is out, with a brand new selector engine (Sizzle), Live Events, simplified event handling, faster appending of HTML and calculation of position, and a switch from browser sniffing to feature detection. All that goodness—plus the 30 bug fixes that went into jQuery 1.3.1—is now available in Aptana Studio. For developers using jQuery this means code assist, completion and inline reference for jQuery APIs plus searchable docs right there in the IDE (and of course JavaScript debugging and all the other capabilities of Aptana Studio).

To get the jQuery 1.3.1 plugin for Aptana Studio:

1. In Aptana Studio, open the Plugins Manager by choosing Aptana > View > Plugins Manager (or Window > Show View > Other... > Aptana Standard Views > Plugins Manager).
2. In the Plugins Manager, select jQuery Support version 1.3.1 and click the green + icon to install.
   
3. In the Updates dialog box, expand the tree until you see the three jQuery plugins. Select Aptana Support for jQuery 1.3.1.00001 and click Next.
   
4. In the Install dialog box, accept the terms of the license agreement and then click Next.
5. In the Verification dialog box, click Install. (The provider of this feature is Aptana.)
6. In the next Install dialog box, click Finish.
7. Aptana Studio will begin downloading the jQuery 1.3.1 plugin. Click Yes when you're prompted to restart, and the features of the new plugin will be available in Studio.

I am pleased to announce ActiveRecord.js, an open source object relational mapper (ORM) that supports multiple JavaScript environments:

• Google Gears (client-side persistence)
• In Memory (if no SQL server is available on the client)
• Adobe AIR (client-side persistence)
• SQLite and MySQL (via Aptana Jaxer, the open source Ajax server)
• additional environments (like HTML5) expected to come through working with the community on the project

ActiveRecord.js abstracts away underlying SQL commands so that JavaScript developers can have a unified API for storing, finding, selecting and retrieving objects and their data using the ActiveRecord pattern popularized by the Ruby on Rails community.

Whereas other projects have sought to directly port Rails' implementation of ActiveRecord to JavaScript, the approach here is different. Existing ActiveRecord aficionados who are used to the ultra succinct vocabulary of Rails' ActiveRecord implementation will instead find something well suited for JavaScript developers adapting the patterns refined by the Rails community (and some influences from Django) into powerful, easy to use APIs.

Example:

var User = ActiveRecord.define('users',{ username: '', email: '' }); User.hasMany('articles'); var ryan = User.create({ username: 'ryan', email: 'rjohnson@aptana.com' }); var Article = ActiveRecord.define('articles',{ name: '', body: '', user_id: 0 }); Article.belongsTo('user'); var a = Article.create({ name: 'Announcing ActiveRecord.js', user_id: ryan.id }); a.set('name','Announcing ActiveRecord.js!!!'); a.save(); a.getUser() == ryan; ryan.getArticleList()[0] == a;

The library ships in a single file, has no external dependencies, and runs client side in all major browsers with or without access to a SQL database and can be used server side with mySQL and SQLite databases via Aptana Jaxer, the open source Ajax server with support for server-side JavaScript. All of the basic features you'd expect are present in this beta release: data validations, life-cycle callbacks, schema creation / migrations and relationships between models. As a beta it's quite stable, and we look forward to your use and feedback to make refinements before calling it 1.0. We're also working with some folks at Google, Mozilla, and Adobe to best achieve the support for JavaScript environments in the browser, on mobile devices, on the desktop and on the server.

Since one target use of this library is for client side stateful applications (using HTML, HTML5, Gears, Adobe AIR, etc...) we have some features that server side only libraries (Aptana Jaxer) don't need to support. One of the features I am most excited about is data synchronization. Although it is nascent, using the current implementation, you can find records or entire result sets and have those found objects automatically receive updates if the data they contain is changed by other queries, or records that should be contained in the result set are created or destroyed. This is marginally useful on its own, but when building user interfaces that depend on data being up to date, I've found it quickly becomes hard to imagine life without it. Synchronization between the client and server is not in the scope of this library yet, but it is on the radar.

If you look in GitHub you will see there is more than just ActiveRecord on the way. ActiveRecord.js is the first part of ActiveJS, a robust MVC framework that's being created explicitly for JavaScript and Ajax apps (and works with other Ajax libraries). I'll be blogging again on these other parts of ActiveJS when they are ready for a public beta, but for those who can't wait, you can find sneak peeks of them in the repo.

For now, enjoy the simplicity of ActiveRecord.js:

• Download ActiveRecord.js 1.0b1
• ActiveRecord.js Tutorial
• API Documentation
• GitHub Repository

I'd also like to make a couple of notes that might preempt a FAQ:

• Not all unit tests pass in IE right now (yes we all complain about IE but MAN do they make it hard!)
• Some sort of IE friendly persistence hack will be built in soon (cookies / form / etc)
• Many to many relationships have yet to be implemented
• All of the built in validations that ship with Rails will be ported (as will ActsAsList and ActsAsTree)
• Synchronization of data between the client and server is still an open question. Send us your ideas and problems!
• We are actively advocating that the HTML 5 spec change to support synchronous SQL queries inside of asynchronous Web Workers, we will not support asynchronous SQL queries unless that part of the spec is ratified. We have experimental support for the current HTML 5 SQL spec as implemented by Safari, but it is currently very difficult to use.

Feel free to ask questions in the ActiveJS Google group. We also welcome pull requests in our GitHub repository if you have forked the project.

Enjoy!

-- Ryan Johnson and Aptana

Whether or not you got the Aptana RadRails 1.1 release last month, Aptana RadRails 1.1.1 is now available too. Here's the highlights for both:

RadRails 1.1 included a few new features, a host of bug fixes, and provided compatiaiblity for Aptana Studio 1.2+:

• fixes broken compatibility between the YML/ERB editors and Studio 1.2+
• provides compatibility with RubyGems 1.2 and 1.3+
• includes the HAML and SASS editor plugins from Brad Wilson of http://blog.lucky-dip.net/. Thanks Brad!
• bundles newer versions of JRuby, which brings with it its own list of bugfixes

RadRails 1.1.1 became available last week. This is a bugfix release that contains a handful of high priority bugfixes. See the full changelog for full details.

For the best experience with RadRails, we recommend updating to, or download, Aptana RadRails 1.1.1 now.

Nokia and Aptana this week started shipping the beta release of Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio. Nokia WRT (Web Runtime) lets you build native apps and widgets for Nokia S60 phones using your JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, and CSS skills -- the stuff standard web pages are made from, but installable on the phone for increased performance, less bandwidth consumption, and more capabilities. We are pleased to be expanding Aptana's support for mobile devices adding Nokia to the growing list of tools for mobile web development using Aptana Studio.

Watch Screencast

Open Standards

The Nokia WRT is based on WebKit. So there's lots of sound, open web technology there as a foundation upon which to build. Despite the "duh factor" of this, it's kind of revolutionary since mobile devices historically have required specialized runtimes, libraries and tools resulting in a highly fractious eco-system for mobile app development. WebKit's adoption by many leading mobile device manufacturers, including Apple for its iPhone, lays a great foundation at last for a mobile standard: JavaScript, HTML, & CSS -- Duh!

Extending Aptana Studio and Eclipse

The Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio is free software built on the Eclipse Plugin model. Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio extends Aptana Studio's core support for Ajax libraries, HTML, CSS and JavaScript and leverages its JavaScript debugging and other features. Aptana Studio can run standalone, or you can also plug Aptana Studio into Eclipse, or other Eclipse-based IDEs.

Nokia WRT Component Library

To get you started fast, Nokia WRT SDK (and its development plugin for Aptana Studio) include a library of Ajax components, optimized for the Nokia WRT. These controls include form elements, navigational controls, and other goodies that are pre-integrated with the capabilities of the Nokia WRT. There's also support for Flash .swf in Nokia WRT.

Nokia Preview and Nokia WRT API Emulation

A Nokia device preview is added to the generic Firefox, Safari and IE previews that are standard in Studio. One click lets you see what your app will look like on a phone at different screen dimensions for different devices. In addition, the preview supports the emulation of the Nokia WRT 1.0 APIs so that you can actually click on stuff and make it work.

Automated Project Creation and Test Deployment

The Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio helps you create ,test, and deploy projects too. The project creation wizard includes and sets up all the resource files you need, including the Nokia WRT components if you want them. Add other Ajax library support via Aptana Studio. The *.wgz packages needed for deployment can be generated by the plugin, and deployed via Bluetooth connections for testing. On Windows operating systems you can also download and install Nokia’s in the S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 and S60 5th Edition SDKs and deploy widgets to the emulator for testing. The plugin is also supported for MacOS, but without the Emulator deployment.

How to get it?

The Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio was developed by Nokia, but is being shipped by Aptana. If you already have Aptana Studio, update to Aptana Studio 1.2.1, then go to Aptana > My Aptana > Plugins > Nokia WRT Plugin > Get It. Otherwise download and install Aptana Studio, then do the above.

It's a BETA so, give us and Nokia your feedback!

Aptana's Nokia mobile device support page has links to the discussion forums for feedback during this beta period. Let us know what you think, where we can improve, likes, dislikes, and new ideas so that we can continue to refine it for you.

PHP development and deployment just got way easier. Today, we're pleased to announce the 1.0 availability of the Aptana PHP development environment. It's got all the things you'd expect from a PHP IDE, plus all the Ajax tooling and other power tools from Aptana Studio. Combine that with the integrated PHP app hosting, staging and management features in Aptana Cloud and you've got an end-to-end PHP development and deployment environment with unprecedented ease of use.

Learn more at our updated PHP section on aptana.com, or get the Aptana PHP plugin for Aptana Studio now and start using the full 1.0 release.

Thank you to all who participated in the betas for both Aptana PHP and Aptana Cloud. Your feedback helps us make the best possible solutions for you. Keep that feedback coming because we're gearing up for the next versions of these already.

We've also started a PHP screencast library. Get insights to working with Aptana PHP and PHP in Aptana Cloud from the engineers who created the software. As of today, you'll find a collection of these screencasts at the new www.aptana.com/php page along with other resources to rapidly get up to speed with Aptana PHP. We'll also be adding to that screencast library over-time with more insights and tips from our team. Just subscribe to this RSS feed to get notified of when new screencasts are available.

I thought you'd also be interested in what some people are saying about Aptana's PHP support in Studio and in Cloud:

"My team and I have used Zend, PHPEdit, and Aptana Studio, all for extended periods of time. All packages 'do the job', but Aptana’s tools actually help you to code more efficiently, and in many different arenas. Today's web developer needs to understand more than one language, and Aptana understands that, with tools for PHP, MySQL, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, AIR, and others."
-- Greg Ervin, IT director for Aurora WDC, a competitive intelligence research firm.

"[IntelliJ] was my editor of choice … But Aptana Studio has delivered a game-changer: the IDE provides integrated deployment to cloud servers."
-- Benjamin Shine, Web developer

"If you're looking to host a PHP application with minimum fuss and the option of scaling up/down then Aptana Cloud is a great choice and certainly by far the easiest way I’ve ever seen to getting an app up and running in the cloud."
-- John Beynon, Web developer with the firm Monochrome

Even with all that's in this release, we want to make Aptana PHP even better for you. So, please be vocal in the forums with your likes or dislikes and report bugs or request feature enhancements through http://support.aptana.com.

Thanks!

-Paul

Aptana Studio 1.2.1 is now available. This update contains several new features and improvements...

• Aptana Menu. Find all the Aptana tools and views in a single menu.
• SSH (Secure Shell). SSH (Secure Shell) into your Cloud sites using your OS's SSH client (putty in case of Windows)
• SmartSync Dialog. The SmartSync has several GUI improvements. It is now possible to sync only parts (selected files and/or folder) of your project and to specify the file permissions for newly uploaded remote files.
• Bundled Subclipse Client. The bundled Subclipse client has been updated to 1.4.2.
• Adobe AIR 1.5 Support. Add the Adobe AIR 1.5 Development Plug-In to Studio 1.2.1.
• Numerous bug fixes as described in the release notes.

Update to or download Aptana Studio 1.2.1 now.

JavaScript is pretty much everywhere you look these days, reaching far beyond your desktop browser. Adobe AIR lets you use JavaScript to create desktop installed HTML and Ajax apps. Apple uses it in its gadgets and in the iPhone's browser. And Nokia recently announced support for installed, local JavaScript apps on its phones with APIs to the camera, GPS, etc... (Anyone spotting a WebKit trend here?) You can even use JavaScript to create extensions for Aptana Studio and Dreamweaver too! Anyways, with all this JavaScript out there powering so many things we use every day, having great JavaScript debugging capabilities is paramount to development.

That's why today we're pleased to announce a huge step forward in the ease of creating Ajax and HTML apps for Adobe AIR: Today's release of the Adobe AIR Development Plug-in for Aptana Studio (beta) features, you guessed it — JavaScript debugging for Adobe AIR apps along with support for Adobe AIR 1.5 which Adobe announced earlier this week.

We previewed the JavaScript debugger for Adobe AIR apps yesterday to a group at Adobe MAX in San Francisco and got applauded for providing this critical utility to the AIR community. Like with other debugging environments you’re familiar with, just click to set a break point in the gutter, then step through, into and out of lines of code while viewing variables and introspecting objects. We think you'll find it quite useful. Did I mention it was free too?

   Check out this short screencast for a preview.

Or, if you can't wait here's how to get your hands on it now:

1. Get Aptana Studio 1.2.0
• New to Aptana Studio? Download and install Aptana Studio 1.2.0.
• Already have Aptana Studio? Open it and select Help > Check for Aptana Updates Now...
2. With Studio 1.2.0 and open, select Window > Preferences, then > Install / Update.
3. Set the Policy URL field to: http://update.aptana.com/update/studio/1.2.1beta/3.2/policy.xml
4. Apply the changes and Close the preferences screen.
5. Next, select Help > Check for Aptana Updates Now...
6. Download and install Aptana Studio 1.2.1 Beta, and restart Studio.
7. Select Help > My Aptana and click on the Plug-ins area.
8. Select the Adobe AIR Development Plug-in from the list and follow the steps.

As I mentioned it's a beta, so we're eager to get feedback now so that we can make final changes as well as start to add enhancement requests for future functionality.

Visit www.aptana.com/air for more info, links to forums, bug reporting, enhancement requests, docs and more resources.

"I discovered Aptana Cloud and to say I’m impressed is an understatement," says John Beynon in his blog post regarding Aptana Cloud. "Without any code changes, I right clicked the project containing my blogs WordPress installation and choose to deploy it to the cloud. After a brief sign up for a trial (no credit card required) and selection of my required service I was good to go and was presented with a synchronise view to send my project up to their servers and a few minutes later my code was all in the ‘cloud’."

Aptana Cloud: Learn More | Watch Screencast

I am excited to announce that the 1.0 version of Jaxer, the free, open source Ajax server, has been released. If you like working with JavaScript and Ajax, you're going to love Jaxer! This 1.0 release of Jaxer is the culmination of three years of work to deliver this first-of-a-kind Ajax server that embeds the Mozilla Firefox browser engine within a server and full JavaScript application framework so that you can use your JavaScript and Ajax skills not just to create web pages but also to create full web applications on the server as well.

If you can't wait, download it now or learn more.

While Jaxer is the brainchild of members of the Aptana team who have been advancing it since Aptana was founded, kudos must also go to the developer community who has actively participated in Jaxer betas since early 2008 and provided much feedback that's guided Jaxer development. Thus in many ways Jaxer is an Ajax server built by web developers for web developers. Jaxer was also created with guidance from members of our technical advisory board including Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Mozilla CTO, who helped us with insights to tune things and deliver initial performance benchmarks for Jaxer in the range of PHP and Ruby on Rails.

If you've already been using Jaxer you're likely familiar with its database, file system and socket APIs and its ability to not only run JavaScript and process the HTML DOM at the server, but also to expose server-side functions to the Web such that a HTML page can call back to those functions directly from the Web page. Thus Ajax communications could not be any easier with Jaxer: You just write a server-side function, "proxy it" with one line of code, then call it from the Web browser as if that function were part of the web page. Jaxer handles the client/server communications, data transformations, and provides the client-side function with its return value (either synchronously or asynchronously).

Recently we've added even more capabilities based on community feedback. These including support for RESTful APIs as well as native support for JSON to supplement the E4X (XML for JavaScript) support that's been there all along (thank you Mozilla!). The combination of these means you can easily create RESTful services that can be consumed by a wide array of Ajax applications, Web gadgets, Facebook or OpenSocial apps, and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight based apps since those support JavaScript too. Plus mobile devices like the Apple iPhone and phones from other manufacturers are nearly all supporting JavaScript and Ajax. As you can imagine we're excited to see JavaScript become more and more the lingua franca of Web applications. It's already ubiquitous on the client side and now you can use it confidently on the server side.

This introduction to Jaxer screencast shows you the Jaxer basics with some examples of using Jaxer's
<script runat="server | both | server-proxy" > settings.

Here are more examples of Jaxer in action:

• Integrating with a database and calling server-side JS functions from the browser
• Using Jaxer to securely communicate across domains and mashup information
• Creating RESTful data services with Jaxer
• Using Ajax libraries server-side to mutate HTML pages before they are served
• Using Jaxer to interact with the server operating system
• Easy file uploading
• Creating Server-Side images with Jaxer

Jaxer 1.0 is dual licensed. It's available to all for free under an open source license or in its Jaxer Pro edition under a commercial license and support agreement from Aptana. Jaxer is available to try in various ways: It is included in Aptana Studio 1.2, can be downloaded standalone, and can be tried for free via Aptana Cloud, our elastically scalable hosting and application lifecycle management service. See http://www.aptana.com/cloud for details.

I'm pleased to announce the release of a major new online service: Aptana Cloud.

Aptana Cloud is the ultimate in ease and efficiency — a suite of online services integrated right into Aptana Studio 1.2 that puts the power of cloud computing to work for you. Cloud's integrated production, staging, source control, application monitoring, threshold and key event notifications systems, stats, logs, server tail views, team management, and tons of other features, streamlines your deployment and development processes and costs far less than doing it yourself.

Users who experienced Aptana Cloud through this summer's early access program have remarked as to how incredibly easy Aptana has made deploying, scaling, developing, and collaborating on hosted sites and applications. It's radically more efficient than anything you've seen or used before (and you can still use SSH and SFTP too). Aptana Cloud currently supports both Jaxer deployments as well as PHP deployments. The short screencast below gives you a good sense of the ease, and you can learn more at http://www.aptana.com/cloud.

Aptana Studio 1.2 also includes new capabilities beyond Aptana Cloud including faster performance, database explorer, bug fixes and UI enhancements all around.

Watch Cloud Screencast

Watch Studio Screencast

Aptana Jaxer, the open-source Ajax server that embeds the Mozilla browser engine server-side, is nearing its first release. There's been lots of work on Jaxer with significant community feedback and ideas coming from the Jaxer betas over the summer. This latest (and probably last before 1.0) release candidate packs in some great performance enhancements like native JSON as well as a brand new built-in capability for easily dispatching RESTful and RPC service requests. And like before we're looking for feedback before we finalize and ship 1.0. So please grab a copy of the latest...

If you've not yet tried Jaxer, now is a great time. Aptana Studio provides extensive integrated tooling and samples for Jaxer, and Aptana Cloud now lets you deploy instantly to Jaxer servers running on elastic cloud computing infrastructure. Of course you can also download Jaxer and put it on your server for free too. It's free and open source.

If you are already using Jaxer, you'll love all the enhancements.

Here a synopsis of all the new features and improvements that have gone into this latest release candidate:

• Jaxer.Sandbox: HTTP-level control; support readyState, toHTML, waitForCompletion
• Built-in, extensible dispatching for RESTful and RPC service requests
• Fast, native JSON support
• Improved APIs for HTTP Request and Response
• More flexible handling of application configuration
• Many bug fixes, smaller improvements, and cleanups

More specifics on these below...

Sandbox enhancements

• return headers and other properties about the request and the response
• new method: waitForCompletion(maxMillis)
• new method: toHTML
• query the readyState

Better HTTP request handling

• More control over how to receive the body, useful for binary data or long posts
• Automatic handling of the body based on Content-Type
• Implement RFC-compliant parsing of the URL
• Offer SSL certificate error handling on requests

Better app management

• Automatically load configApps-like files
• Cleaned up the default local version of configApps.js

Support for web services

• Added default sample-level dispatchers for web service requests and RPC requests
• Allow specifying a handler explicitly for your app
• Support for RESTful calls (including GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD)
• Default Apache and Studio configs route URLs containing jaxer-service and jaxer-rpc to Jaxer

JSON improvements

• Use native JSON when available
• Use "standard" JSON serialization by default
• More explicit error message when cycles encountered

DB improvements

• MySQL: Allow specifying a socket when defining connection parameters
• MySQL: Correct handling of booleans
• Resultset: cleaned up the data structure to make it more efficient and easily serializable

Better HTTP Response handling

• Allow setContents to take a DOM node, a document, or an object, and "do the right thing"

Misc improvements

• Much faster start/stop/restart and more robust Jaxer process management

Dojo 1.2 was just released over at www.dojotoolkit.org, and it's also available in Aptana Studio! The Dojo 1.2 plugin for Aptana Studio provides code completion; code assist for Dojo Core, Dijit, and DojoX; sample code; project wizards; and more to support your Dojo development efforts.

The Dojo team is calling this their "sliced bread" release because each change or enhancement felt like the best thing since sliced bread. See for yourself what they've been up to in the release notes, and then get started using Dojo 1.2 in Studio!

To get the Dojo 1.2 plugin for Aptana Studio:

1. In Aptana Studio, open the Plugins Manager by choosing Window > Show View > Other... > Aptana Standard Views > Plugins Manager.
2. In the Plugins Manager, select Dojo version 1.2.0 and click the green +icon to install.
   
3. In the Updates dialog box, expand the tree until you see the five Dojo plugins. Select Aptana Support for Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0.00001 and click Next.
   
4. In the Install dialog box, accept the terms of the license agreement and then click Next.
5. In the Verification dialog box, click Install. (The provider of this feature is Aptana.)
6. In the next Install dialog box, click Finish.
7. Aptana Studio will begin downloading the Dojo 1.2 plugin. Click Yes when you're prompted to restart, and the features of the new plugin will be available in Studio.

As of today you can download or update to the latest release candidates of Aptana Studio, Jaxer and Cloud. These are major releases for our company: we're updating Studio to a new version, we're releasing an incredible new service, Aptana Cloud, and we've reached our 1.0 milestone of one of the world's most unique offerings, the first Ajax Server, Aptana Jaxer.

Cloud 1.0 RC makes web app deployment and management almost too easy!

Aptana Cloud is a new service from Aptana that is completely integrated into Aptana Studio enabling you to more easily develop, deploy, and manage your web applications. With PHP, Apache, MySQL and Jaxer servers already running on top of an elastic computing infrastructure, Aptana Cloud is the fastest way to deploy and scale your sites and apps. Even before you go live, Cloud's hosted SVN, SFTP and staging servers combined with the remote file editing, database management, and Cloud configuration tools make site development and management a breeze.

You can see all the features or watch this screencast to check out just how seamless Aptana has made deploying and scaling your apps in the "Cloud".

We wanted to push out a RC (Release Candidate) version prior to final release so that you could give it a try. It's absolutely free right now, so we'd love for you to try it out. Let us know what you think. Let us know if we missed anything or if you'd like to see something done differently. You can get started by downloading Aptana Studio 1.2 RC (which comes bundled with Jaxer 1.0 RC as well as our Cloud RC support), or if you are an existing Studio user, follow these update instructions.

Studio 1.2 RC adds new capabilities and improves upon many core features.

Enhancements include: Updated smart synchronization utility and a brand new set of visual database tools plus numerous bug fixes and UI enhancements with performance improvements throughout. A new Aptana ID system provides single-sign for the bug database (ASAP), Aptana Cloud, and soon the discussion forums and more. And there's a new 'My Aptana' start page with quick links to your recent files and core features.

Jaxer 1.0 RC adds and refines more features for server-side JavaScript and Ajax.

Since Jaxer is the world's first Ajax server, this release candidate is a huge milestone. This next-to-final release of Jaxer has some great performance improvements that make it comparable to Ruby on Rails and PHP, plus includes new APIs for JSON and REST style data services.
If you are not yet familiar, Jaxer lets you use your JavaScript and Ajax skills server-side to create entire apps, or optimized presentation tiers that can complement other back-ends. Aptana Studio 1.2 RC includes the Jaxer 1.0 RC.

As we get ready to release Jaxer 1.0, we put together a few simple benchmarks to see how it performs relative to a couple of other web platforms: PHP and Rails. We wanted to answer a simple question: how does Jaxer, with its server-side DOM and JavaScript, perform relative to these other popular alternatives?

This was not designed to be an all-encompassing shoot-out, or a detailed study of everything you might want to do in a web app. Instead, we took a few common tasks — making database requests, using JSON, etc. — and implemented them as you might expect in the three platforms. We made enough DB requests and JSON calls and so on to give us a reasonable number of milliseconds to measure. But we also wanted to make the repetitions representative of what you might find on somewhat intensive real-world page, so we're not making a million DB requests, just a hundred, for instance. And we included one benchmark of serving an almost-static page: the "almost" was to make sure we were measuring the time the platform took to really read through the page, in case it had dynamic content in it. (Otherwise, if the page were truly static, you could always arrange for the web server to serve it without involving the platform.)

The first chart shows how long each platform took to perform the task. For the "static" page, we measured the total time taken to serve the request, as measured by the external web client making the request (over the local network). For the other benchmarks, we measured the time taken to perform the specific task itself, excluding the overhead of setting up and tearing down the benchmark, serving the test page, etc. That allowed us to combine these tests and assess what an entire page would take to serve, if it had static content and database requests and some JSON manipulation and so on. Of course your mileage may vary: your app may have less DB requests, more JSON, less IO, whatever. But remember the question we're trying to answer: how does Jaxer perform relative to other accepted platforms for several common tasks? We believe these benchmarks answer that: Jaxer performance is very much comparable to PHP and Rails.

Of course, significant boosts to JavaScript performance are around the corner for Firefox (see Brendan's TraceMonkey article). Since Jaxer is built on the same engine as Firefox, those same improvements will soon be in Jaxer too... With the imminent and massive improvements to JavaScript performance coming to the Mozilla engine.

Now let's take a closer look at these tests below. All were run multiple times on a Macbook Pro (2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) with 4 GB of RAM.

---

The "Static" Page

We grabbed a copy of one of our blog pages (Aptana Acquires Pydev) and saved it locally. We turned it into a .php file with a smidgen of PHP in it; we threw in a short <script runat="server">...<script> for Jaxer; and created a simple view out of it for Rails. Jaxer was the slowest to serve this page, and not surprisingly: it needs to parse and create the entire DOM of the page to allow server-side manipulation. Still, under 20 ms is pretty good, and is usually dwarfed by weightier tasks such as DB queries.

---

Loops

To measure raw iteration speed we created some very simple loops with and without a bit of variable manipulation. This time Jaxer was far faster than PHP or Rails: at least for simple, common for loops, Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine is no slouch.

PHP	Jaxer	Rails
for($a = 0; $a < 10000; ++$a) { // do nothing } for($a = 0; $a < 10000; ++$a) { $b = $a; } for($a = 0; $a < 10000; ++$a) { $b = $a; for($c = 0; $c < 10; ++$c) { $d = $c; } } $a = 0; while($a < 10000) { ++$a; }	for(var a = 0; a < 10000; ++a) { // do nothing } for(var a = 0; a < 10000; ++a) { var b = a; } for(var a = 0; a < 10000; ++a) { var b = a; for(var c = 0; c < 10; ++c) { var d = c; } } var a = 0; while(a < 10000) { ++a; }	10000.times do |a| # do nothing end 10000.times do |a| b = a end 10000.times do |a| b = a 10.times do |c| d = c end end a = 0 while a < 10000 a += 1 end

---

JSON

Using JavaScript literals as a serialization format predates Ajax, and has become an incredibly prevalent cross-platform data format. We created a simple JSON structure and a more complex one, and measured a variety of encoding and decoding tasks. All three platforms now have native JSON support, so all three performed very well in this benchmark.

$json_string = '{"c": "c", "a": "a", "d": {"three": "3", "one": "1", "two": "2"}, "b": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]}'; $json_data = array( 'a' => 'a', 'b' => array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), 'c' => 'c', 'd' => array( 'one' => '1', 'two' => '2', 'three' => '3' ) ); $complex_json_string = '[{"id": "0001","type": "donut","name": "Cake","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "1003", "type": "Blueberry" },{ "id": "1004", "type": "Devil\'s Food" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5007", "type": "Powdered Sugar" },{ "id": "5006", "type": "Chocolate with Sprinkles" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0002","type": "donut","name": "Raised","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0003","type": "donut","name": "Old Fashioned","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]}]'; for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) { $decoded_a = json_decode($json_string,true); $decoded_b = json_decode($complex_json_string,true); json_encode($json_data); json_encode($decoded_b); } $output = ''; for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) { $decoded = json_decode($complex_json_string,true); foreach($decoded as $x => $item) { if($item['id'] == '0001') { $decoded[$x]['type'] = 'fancy donut'; break; } } $output .= json_encode($decoded); } var json_string = '{"c": "c", "a": "a", "d": {"three": "3", "one": "1", "two": "2"}, "b": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]}'; var json_data = { a: 'a', b: [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], c: 'c', d: { one: '1', two: '2', three: '3' } }; var complex_json_string = '[{"id": "0001","type": "donut","name": "Cake","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "1003", "type": "Blueberry" },{ "id": "1004", "type": "Devil\'s Food" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5007", "type": "Powdered Sugar" },{ "id": "5006", "type": "Chocolate with Sprinkles" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0002","type": "donut","name": "Raised","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0003","type": "donut","name": "Old Fashioned","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]}]'; for(var i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { var decoded_a = Jaxer.Serialization.fromJSONString(json_string); var decoded_b = Jaxer.Serialization.fromJSONString(complex_json_string); Jaxer.Serialization.toJSONString(decoded_a); Jaxer.Serialization.toJSONString(decoded_b); } var output = ''; for(var i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { var decoded = Jaxer.Serialization.fromJSONString(complex_json_string); for(var x = 0; x < decoded.length; ++x) { if(decoded[x]['id'] == '0001') { decoded[x]['type'] = 'fancy donut'; } } output += Jaxer.Serialization.toJSONString(decoded); } json_string = '{"c": "c", "a": "a", "d": {"three": "3", "one": "1", "two": "2"}, "b": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]}' json_data = { :a => 'a', :b => [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], :c => 'c', :d => { :one => '1', :two => '2', :three => '3' } } complex_json_string = '[{"id": "0001","type": "donut","name": "Cake","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "1003", "type": "Blueberry" },{ "id": "1004", "type": "Devil\'s Food" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5007", "type": "Powdered Sugar" },{ "id": "5006", "type": "Chocolate with Sprinkles" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0002","type": "donut","name": "Raised","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5005", "type": "Sugar" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]},{"id": "0003","type": "donut","name": "Old Fashioned","ppu": 0.55,"batters":{"batter":[{ "id": "1001", "type": "Regular" },{ "id": "1002", "type": "Chocolate" }]},"topping":[{ "id": "5001", "type": "None" },{ "id": "5002", "type": "Glazed" },{ "id": "5003", "type": "Chocolate" },{ "id": "5004", "type": "Maple" }]}]'; 10.times do decoded_a = JSON.parse(json_string) decoded_b = JSON.parse(complex_json_string) decoded_a.to_json decoded_b.to_json end 10.times do decoded = JSON.parse(complex_json_string) decoded.each_with_index do |item,x| if(item['id'] == '0001') decoded[x]['type'] = 'fancy donut' end end output += decoded.to_json end

---

IO

To measure typical file I/O performance, we created a 1 KB string and wrote it to a file, then appended a 100 KB string, and read the whole thing back, and repeated it a few times. Jaxer came out somewhat slower than the other platforms: some of this may be due to the extra conversions between JavaScript's native utf8 encoding and the filesystem, but we'll need to go back and dig deeper.

//write 1kb for($i = 0; $i < 5; ++$i) { $handle = fopen($path.'/test_'.$i.'.txt','w'); fwrite($handle,$chars); fclose($handle); } //append 100kb for($i = 0; $i < 5; ++$i) { $handle = fopen($path.'/test_'.$i.'.txt','a'); fwrite($handle,$chars_repeated); fclose($handle); } //read them all back multiple times for($i = 0; $i < 5; ++$i) { $contents = file_get_contents($path.'/test_'.$i.'.txt'); } //write 1kb for (var i = 0; i < 5; ++i) { Jaxer.File.write(path + '/test_' + i + '.txt', chars); } //append 100kb for (var i = 0; i < 5; ++i) { Jaxer.File.append(path + '/test_' + i + '.txt', chars_repeated); } //read them all back multiple times for (var i = 0; i < 5; ++i) { var contents = path + Jaxer.File.read(path + '/test_' + i + '.txt'); } #write 1kb 5.times do |i| handle = File.open(path + '/test_' + i.to_s + '.txt','w') handle.write chars handle.close end #write 100kb 5.times do |i| handle = File.open(path + '/test_' + i.to_s + '.txt','a') handle.write chars_repeated handle.close end 5.times do |i| contents = File.read(path + '/test_' + i.to_s + '.txt') end

---

DB

To measure database performance, we tried to level the playing field as much as possible by coding straight SQL statements. We also emphasized SELECTs over DML queries because most apps read much more than they write. Jaxer came out somewhere between PHP and Rails, with half its time spent wrapping the raw MySQL data in easier-to-manipulate JavaScript structures. Of course in real-world apps you're likely to use prepared statements, and very often (esp. in Rails, and soon in Jaxer too) an Object-Relational Mapping such as ActiveRecord to abstract out the SQL calls.

for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) { mysql_query('INSERT INTO aptana_benchmark_test (a,b,c) VALUES("'.$chars.'","'.$chars.'","'.$chars_repeated.'")',$connection); } for($i = 0; $i < 100; ++$i) { mysql_query('SELECT * FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = '.($i + 1),$connection); } for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) { mysql_query('UPDATE aptana_benchmark_test SET a="'.$chars2.'",b ="'.$chars2.'",c="'.$chars2_repeated.'" WHERE id = '.($i + 1),$connection); } for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) { mysql_query('DELETE FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = '.($i + 1),$connection); } for (var i=0; i<10; i++) { conn.execute('INSERT INTO aptana_benchmark_test (a,b,c) VALUES("' + chars + '","' + chars + '","' + chars_repeated + '")'); } for (var i=0; i<100; ++i) { conn.execute('SELECT * FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = ' + (i + 1)); } for (var i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { conn.execute('UPDATE aptana_benchmark_test SET a="' + chars2 + '",b ="' + chars2 + '",c="' + chars2_repeated + '" WHERE id = ' + (i + 1)); } for (var i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { conn.execute('DELETE FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = ' + (i + 1)); } 10.times do |i| ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('INSERT INTO aptana_benchmark_test (a,b,c) VALUES("' + chars + '","' + chars + '","' + chars_repeated + '")') end 100.times do |i| ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('SELECT * FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = ' + (i + 1).to_s); end 10.times do |i| ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('UPDATE aptana_benchmark_test SET a="' + chars2 + '",b ="' + chars2 + '",c="' + chars2_repeated + '" WHERE id = ' + (i + 1).to_s); end 10.times do |i| ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('DELETE FROM aptana_benchmark_test WHERE id = ' + (i + 1).to_s); end

---

Scrape

Finally, we included some page scraping tests. Many web apps mash up other content, repurpose it, or extract data from remote sources. In our case we read in the same blog page as in the static example, and navigated it in a variety of ways. PHP was fastest here, with Jaxer slightly behind and Rails a distant third. Looking for a moment beyond performance, Jaxer is the only platform that would allow scraping of true Ajax web pages, for example pages that created their content "client-side" via Ajax calls.

//find search input box for($i = 0; $i < 5; ++$i) { $contents = file_get_contents('./static.html'); $dom = new DOMDocument(); @$dom->loadHTML($contents); //find by xpath $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom); $inputs = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//form//input"); $node = false; foreach($inputs as $input) { if($input->getAttribute('id') == 'edit-search-block-form-keys') { $node = $input; } } $divs = $xpath->evaluate('/html/div[@id="gbar"]'); //find by DOM $inputs = $dom->getElementsByTagName('input'); foreach($inputs as $input) { if($input->getAttribute('id') == 'edit-search-block-form-keys') { $node = $input; } } $bar = $dom->getElementById('edit-search-block-form-keys'); } var sandbox = new Jaxer.Sandbox(null,null,{ allowJavaScript: false, allowMetaRedirects: false, allowSubFrames: false }); for(var i = 0; i < 5; ++i) { sandbox.setContents(Jaxer.File.read(Jaxer.Dir.combine(Jaxer.request.currentFolder,'static.html'))); //find by xpath var inputs = sandbox.document.evaluate("/html/body//form//input",sandbox.document,null,XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,null); var search_input = null; for(var x = 0; x < inputs.snapshotLength; ++x) { if(inputs.snapshotItem(x).id == 'edit-search-block-form-keys') { search_input = inputs.snapshotItem(x); } } var divs = sandbox.document.evaluate('/html/div[@id="edit-search-block-form-keys"]',sandbox.document,null,XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,null); //find by DOM var inputs = sandbox.document.getElementsByTagName('input'); for(var x = 0; x < inputs.length; ++x) { if(inputs[x].id == 'edit-search-block-form-keys') { search_input = inputs[x]; } } var bar = sandbox.document.getElementById('edit-search-block-form-keys'); } 5.times do #typical blog page queries doc = Hpricot(open(RAILS_ROOT + '/public/static.html')) inputs = doc/"/html/body//form//input" node = inputs.find{|input| input.attributes['id'] && input.attributes['id'] == 'edit-search-block-form-keys'} divs = doc/'/html/div[@id="edit-search-block-form-keys"]' inputs = doc/'input' divs = doc/'#edit-search-block-form-keys' end

---

Try it yourself

You can download the complete source we used to generate and display these results, and try them yourself. The README file should have the instructions you need. You can grab Apache+Jaxer from the Aptana download site, Apache+PHP+MySQL from several places such as XAMPP, and Ruby and Rails from RubyOnRails.org (if it isn't already on your platform — you'll need Rails 2.1.0, the json Ruby gem, and to run the tests in production mode).

---

Feedback

If you'd like to discuss these, I've started a forum thread for this.

The latest update to jQuery, version 1.2.6, includes faster event handling, faster CSS selectors, an overhaul of attr(), improvements to toggle(), support for all the Dimensions plugin methods (the plugin is now part of the core code), and more... and now it's available in Aptana Studio as well!

If your copy of Studio is set to automatically check for updates, you'll be prompted to install the jQuery 1.2.6 plugin with the next check. If you check manually, follow the steps below to get the updated library files, code assist, and local, searchable documentation that come with the jQuery 1.2.6 plugin:

1. In Aptana Studio, choose Help > Software Updates > Find and Install...
2. Select the "Search for new features to install" option and click Next.
3. Click the New Remote Site... button (top right).
4. In the dialog box that appears, enter Aptana jQuery Update Site as the name and http://update.aptana.com/update/frameworks/jquery/ as the URL and click OK.
5. Aptana jQuery Update Site will now appear in the list of update sites and be checked automatically. Click Finish.
6. In the next dialog box that appears, expand the nodes until you see Aptana Support for jQuery 1.2.6.00002, select that option, and click Next.
7. Accept the terms of the license agreement and click Next.
8. In the next dialog box, click Finish.
9. In the Feature Verification dialog box, click Install.
10. Click Yes when prompted to restart.

We're happy to announce that we've updated our support for the Ext JS library to the latest version, 2.2. Ext JS 2.2 contains numerous bug fixes and feature enhancements, including full Firefox 3 support, improved checkbox and radio groups, a history component, and a GMapPanel extension that packages Google Maps functionality into an Ext component. It's also fully backwards-compatible, so you should be able to move to this version from 2.0 without difficulty (though you can also install 2.2 into Studio alongside 2.0 if you want).

The Ext JS 2.2 plugin for Aptana Studio provides code completion, code assist, Ext JS 2.2 examples, project wizards and more atop solid javascript coding and Ajax debugging utilities so that you can be as productive as possible with Ext JS.

To get the Ext JS 2.2 plugin for Aptana Studio:

1. In Aptana Studio, open the Plugins Manager.
   
2. In the Plugins Manager, select Ext Support version 2.2.0 and click the green +icon to install.
   
3. In the Updates dialog box, expand the tree until you see the three available Ext JS plugins. Select Aptana Support for EXT 2.2.0.00002 and click Next.
   
4. In the Install dialog box, accept the terms of the license agreement and then click Next.
5. In the Verification dialog box, click Install. (The provider of this feature is Aptana.)
6. In the next Install dialog box, click Finish.
7. Aptana Studio will begin downloading the Ext JS 2.2 plugin. Click Yes when you're prompted to restart, and you'll have all the features of the new plugin at your fingertips.

We are very excited to announce that Pydev, the popular Python and Jython IDE, is now part of the Aptana product family and that Pydev creator, Fabio Zadronzy, will head up continued efforts to advance Pydev as part of the Aptana team. Like our products for Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and PHP, Pydev offers code completion, refactoring, code analysis, debugging support, and lots lots more. Pydev's popularity in the Python community and Eclipse ecosystem made it the clear choice for Aptana. The acquisition sets the stage for a full Python suite of products and services ranging from local development to cloud deployment.

Interest in Python has been steadily growing and earlier this year got a big boost when Google announced that Python was the language for Google App Engine.

Dion Almaer, Open Web Advocate for Google recently commented "This has been a great year for the Python developer community with the advent of great frameworks such as Django and deployment solutions such as Google App Engine. Now the tooling is getting better all the time. One of the great tools is Pydev, especially if you are Eclipse-minded. Having Aptana take on Pydev only means progress for that project and Python developers."

Google is also a worldwide licensee of the commercial version of Pydev, Pydev Extensions, which includes even more high-productivity features for Python developers.

Today you can use the products side by side, installing Pydev into Aptana Studio, or plugging both into Eclipse. The combination gives Python developers access to all of Aptana's great tooling for Ajax and current Aptana Studio users access to one of the best Python IDEs out there, and the ease of using both together should increase as we integrate the products more closely over the coming months.

You can learn more about Pydev and Aptana's support for Python at http://www.aptana.com/python, or just go straight to the Pydev and Pydev Extensions sites for downloads and more details.

Please start submitting your ideas for future feature enhancements and how you'd like to see these products come together.

Tom Kirkpatrick of codegobbler.com has told us he's writing a series of articles on some of the great features in Aptana Jaxer. His most recent article is on the new Jaxer.Process APIs that lets Jaxer interact with the operating system on the server to achieve all kinds of things. (Yes you heard right. That's JavaScript interacting with the operating system).

Tom's simple example, complete with full source calls usr/bin/uptime to get the uptime, then display it in the webpage. There's a full working demo to if you want to see the uptime of codegobbler.com's server too.

<script runat="server-proxy"> function runUptime() { // run the uptime and return the output from STDOUT return Jaxer.Process.exec("/usr/bin/uptime"); } </script>

Good work Tom! We look forward to more great stuff from codegobbler.com

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.

We're finalizing our Jaxer 1.0 release, and I thought I'd go back to Paul's 'DOM Scraping' example and see what Jaxer 1.0 has to offer.

A main new feature is Jaxer.Sandbox, which lets you open new server-side sandboxed 'windows' and load pages into them. You can GET a page from any url, or even POST some content and load back the response. You can control whether JavaScript is executed in the window, whether it honors meta refreshes, whether it loads synchronously or asynchronously, etc. And, most important, the window and its contents have no access to Jaxer and its APIs nor to your app — but your app has full access to it.

There's a lot of other new goodness in Jaxer 1.0, as well as the official released version of the Mozilla engine found in Firefox 3. So for example getElementsByClassName is natively implemented (see John Resig's speed comparison), in addition to the other Mozilla features such as built-in XPath functionality and a very robust DOM feature set — just what you need for some serious 'screen scraping', mashups, and content repurposing.

Let's see it in action. First, let's grab the same three pages Paul used and extract some choice content elements into our page before sending it to the browser. We'll reuse the same Jaxer.Sandbox instance three times, each time loading a different page into it and grabbing some content by id or by classname. The page is basically a single script block: <html> <head> <title>DOM Scraping 1.0</title> </head> <body> <script runat="server"> ...all code here... </script> </body> </html> containing the following server-side JavaScript: var sandbox = new Jaxer.Sandbox(); var item, contents; sandbox.open("http://www.news.com/"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementById("mostPopStories"); addToPage("News.com Popular Stories", contents); sandbox.open("http://www.washingtonpost.com/"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementsByClassName("top-box-in"); addToPage("Washington Post", contents); sandbox.open("http://ajaxian.com"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementsByClassName("activitystream"); addToPage("Ajaxian", contents); and a single helper function that adds the given contents from the sandbox to the current page: function addToPage(title, contents) { var div = document.createElement('div'); var h2 = document.createElement('h2'); h2.innerHTML = title; div.appendChild(h2); if (!(contents instanceof HTMLElement)) contents = contents[0]; div.appendChild(document.importNode(contents, true)); document.body.appendChild(div); }

Here's the resulting page:

That's not too bad, but the timestamps on the News.com section don't look good, and there are a bunch of JavaScript errors on the browser from left-over JavaScript content that was in the original WashingtonPost.com page. We can quickly clean that up with another, tiny DOM helper function that removes any DOM NodeList you pass to it. And while we're at it we'll also remove the reference to the client-side Jaxer framework since we won't be needing it here. The script block becomes: var sandbox = new Jaxer.Sandbox(); var item, contents, container; sandbox.open("http://www.news.com/"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementById("mostPopStories"); container = addToPage("News.com Popular Stories", contents); // Remove the timestamps on each item removeNodeList(container.getElementsByClassName("datestamp")); sandbox.open("http://www.washingtonpost.com/"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementsByClassName("top-box-in"); container = addToPage("Washington Post", contents); // Remove the script tags so they don't appear on the client removeNodeList(container.getElementsByTagName("script")); sandbox.open("http://ajaxian.com"); contents = sandbox.document.getElementsByClassName("activitystream"); addToPage("Ajaxian", contents); function addToPage(title, contents) { var div = document.createElement('div'); var h2 = document.createElement('h2'); h2.innerHTML = title; div.appendChild(h2); if (!(contents instanceof HTMLElement)) contents = contents[0]; div.appendChild(document.importNode(contents, true)); document.body.appendChild(div); return div; // return the container so it can be further manipulated } function removeNodeList(nodeList) { while (nodeList.length > 0) nodeList[0].parentNode.removeChild(nodeList[0]); } // We won't need Jaxer client-side: Jaxer.response.setClientFramework(null);

Now that's much better:

But if you run this example yourself, you'll see it's slow: each of the original servers is a bit slow to load its entire page, and you have to load all three server-side before your page is ready to be sent to the browser. We could load all three in parallel, using the Jaxer.Sandbox's async capabilities and the Jaxer.Thread.waitFor() method to wait for them to load. But even then the user would see nothing in the browser until the slowest one was done loading server-side. So let's load them asynchronously client-side, by creating a server-side function called getFragment that loads a url and returns some of its contents, and setting getFragment.proxy = true so we can call it asynchronously from the client. The page now has two script blocks, one that runs on the browser and one on the server: <html> <head> <title>DOM Scraping 1.0</title> </head> <body> <script> ...all client-side code here... </script> <script runat="server"> ...all server-side code here... </script> </body> </html> The client-side code is: // On callback, append the results to this page function appendHTML(html) { document.body.innerHTML += html; } // onload is used to make sure getFragment is defined before it's called: window.onload = function() { Jaxer.Callback.TIMEOUT = 30 * 1000; getFragment.async(appendHTML, "Ajaxian Activity Stream", "http://ajaxian.com", true, "activitystream"); getFragment.async(appendHTML, "News.com Popular Stories", "http://www.news.com/", false, "mostPopStories", "datestamp"); getFragment.async(appendHTML, "Washington Post", "http://www.washingtonpost.com/", true, "top-box-in"); } and the server-side code is: // Gets a fragment of the remote page's HTML, after some cleanup function getFragment(title, url, isClassName, identifier, classesToRemove) { var sandbox = new Jaxer.Sandbox(url); var contents = sandbox.document[isClassName ? 'getElementsByClassName' : 'getElementById'](identifier); var container = addToPage(title, contents); if (classesToRemove) { if (typeof classesToRemove == "string") classesToRemove = [classesToRemove]; classesToRemove.forEach(function(className) { removeNodeList(container.getElementsByClassName(className)); }); } return container.innerHTML; } getFragment.proxy = true; function addToPage(title, contents) { var div = document.createElement('div'); var h2 = document.createElement('h2'); h2.innerHTML = title; div.appendChild(h2); if (!(contents instanceof HTMLElement)) contents = contents[0]; div.appendChild(document.importNode(contents, true)); document.body.appendChild(div); return div; } function removeNodeList(nodeList) { while (nodeList.length > 0) nodeList[0].parentNode.removeChild(nodeList[0]); } The result looks the same as the previous screenshot, but the order in which the sections are displayed may vary, depending on which remote server responds first.

We are pleased to announce that Greg Murray (creator of the jMaki Ajax framework, former Ajax architect for Sun Microsystems, Sun NetBeans IDE team member and lead on the Java Servlet 2.5 specification) and Ryan Johnson (creator of the livepipe and object.event Ajax libraries) have joined the Aptana Jaxer team!

Greg's primary role will be creating increasingly robust application frameworks for Jaxer, Aptana's open source Ajax server product. Ryan has already been working on MVC concepts for Jaxer and will be collaborating with Greg and the rest of the Jaxer team to drive that and other great concepts for Jaxer forward.

The timing could not be better. Greg and Ryan have joined up just before we get the Jaxer 1.0 release candidate out the door to the whole community (it's just a matter of days now). This puts us in a great position to start working on some of the next things that'll be in store for Jaxer in the coming months -- and there are some great ideas brewing. For example, Greg and Ryan have already been collaborating with the Jaxer team to create an ActiveRecord-like JavaScript ORM for Jaxer that promises to make working with JavaScript data a pleasure -- since it'll all be native JavaScript! Dion Almaer and others in the community have been championing this idea as well. Now we're doing it! Of course Greg and Ryan are both deeply involved in the Ajax community in their own ways as well: Greg with the jMaki project and Ryan with Dynamic Reach and his active role in the Prototype community. So be on the lookout for blog posts from Greg and Ryan to keep abreast of all the stuff they'll be up to here at Aptana.

This beta is for two groups: People who want to try Jaxer RC 1.0, and, People using Eclipse 3.4 who want to test updated Studio compatibility.

Existing Studio users:
Use policy file http://beta.aptana.com/php/3.2/policy.xml, then perform a normal update.

Eclipse 3.4 users:
Follow the instructions at Plugging Aptana into an existing Eclipse configuration and use http://beta.aptana.com/php/studio/3.2/ as the update site.

Related: Changing the update type of your Aptana Studio and Specifying a Policy URL

New in Studio

• New version of Jaxer
• Eclipse 3.4 compatibility

New in Jaxer

(For more complete list, see Migrating from Jaxer beta.)

• Server-side image loading
• JaxerManager/Logging through a single central process
• App management through a new apps subsystem along with more convenient defaults
• Support for native (operating system) process execution
• Simplified state (session-like) containers

One of our users asked about extending Jaxer to do some image processing. He wanted to extend Jaxer using a language he had been already using for some of his back-end work, in this case, Microsoft's C# language which is part of .NET.

I quickly launched my VMWare Fusion into Vista, gulp, and proceeded to run Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. This posting won't be a tutorial on how to write C#, but i'll just go over some of the basics of setting up a simple C#-based COM object that can be used from within Jaxer.

The first thing to note is that to register COM objects in Vista, you need to be Administrator, so just launch Visual Studio as Administrator using the right-click menu 'Run as Administrator'. Once you have Visual Studio running, start by creating a new 'Class Library' project.

Once you've created the project, right-click on the project and go to the Properties menu, we'll want to make this object a COM-visible one.

In the 'Build' section of the properties, scroll to the bottom and check the 'Register for COM Interop' checkbox. This will make your object visible to other languages as a COM object.

The next thing you'll need to do is open your 'AssemblyInfo.cs' file, which is usually in your Properties folder of your project. Be sure to change the 'false' value to 'true' for the 'ComVisible' setting:

Now that you've done that, you can just create a COM object the 'usual' way. The complete project is attached, so you can take a look there. The image processing code was borrowed from the following online tutorial: http://blog.paranoidferret.com/index.php/2007/06/13/csharp-tutorial-image-editing-rotate/

Once you've got your object compiled, using it from within Jaxer is super-easy! You can just use the COMObject function to create a wrapped instance of the native object and then just use functions and properties on it just as if it were native JavaScript.

So here is the very short HTML file and JavaScript code running server-side via Jaxer that creates the COM object, loads our image, rotates it via the input field in the HTML form, and then saves it back as a new image. The communications from JS to .NET happens very quickly and as you can see, was super-simple to set up.

<html> <body> <script runat="server-proxy"> function rotate(angle) { var img = COMObject("ImageProcessor.ImageProcessing"); img.LoadImage(Jaxer.request.documentRoot + "/photo.jpg"); img.RotateImage(angle); img.SaveImage(Jaxer.request.documentRoot + "/new.jpg"); } </script> <input id="angle"> <input type="button" value="Rotate" onclick="rotate(document.getElementById('angle').value); document.getElementById('img').src = document.getElementById('img').src + '?' + new Date()"> <br/> <img id='img' src="new.jpg"> </body> </html>

Here's a screenshot of the image being rotated:

What's really cool is that you can write anything you like in C#/VB.NET and easily access it via JavaScript in Jaxer. Note how in my sample, the onclick event for the button calls the server-side JavaScript function directly, which in turn calls the .NET COM object. That is, you can bind browser-side buttons directly to back-end .NET COM objects, all in JavaScript through Jaxer!

Attachment	Size
MyCOMObject.zip	15.16 KB

This week Aptana shipped the 2 millionth copy of Aptana Studio! This is a huge milestone for Aptana for which we owe a big thank you to the community -- not just for downloading Studio, but more importantly for helping make Aptana Studio the leading open source IDE in its category through your feedback, ideas, and suggestions (and for reporting bugs when they happen).

For Open Source Developers by Open Source Developers

We really see the success of Aptana products stemming from the philosophy that it's "for developers by developers" and our open source model help us fulfill that through rapid release cycles, nightly builds, and overall a more fluid process that's constantly taking in feedback from the community. And what better kind of solution is there than the one the community told us to build.

We're continuing that philosophy now with our Aptana Cloud offering (currently in beta) as well as our support for Ruby on Rails, PHP and LAMP development, and of course app development with Ajax libraries on the client side and for those that want server-side Ajax, Aptana Jaxer, a first-of its kind open source Ajax server built around the Mozilla browser engine.

Help us help you. Join the Aptana Early Access Programs

Cloud, PHP and Jaxer are all in active beta stages right now and you can get your hands on them through the Aptana Cloud Early Access Program, so it's a great time to request early access and give early feedback. RadRails, for streamlined Ruby on Rails development is already 1.0 so feedback in the forums and the bug/enhancement system right now is best for that. This early feedback has direct and immediate impact on what we'll ship this year. So now is the time. Got something you want to see in Aptana's offerings? Let us know. Get involved. Help us help you.

One of the things I was working on recently is 'screen scraping' some data from several sites and presenting them in a single page. Of course Jaxer seems like the perfect tool for this as I can go fetch the data server-side, pull it all together, then present the final page to the browser. It was so exciting to see this work that I thought I'd make this post to share my experience with you!

We’re working now on adding support in Jaxer for being able to programmatically create 'window' objects, filling them with content from a remote URL, having that content actually execute, then being able to go into that window object and pull DOM elements out. (Update: see the Jaxer 1.0 version.)

Unfortunately for me, that work isn't ready yet, so I wanted to see if there was some workaround I could use until it was ready. Well, after some research and trial and error, a workaround was found. The only catch with this code is that if there is any JavaScript on the page(s) you are fetching, that code will not execute, that’s coming soon.

Note that all of the code below can be contained within a single script tag:

<script runat='server'>...all code here...</script>

So, the first thing I wanted to do is make it really easy to fetch a remote document and grab out some content. I didn't want to use string matching or regular expressions of any kind, I wanted to use my trusted 'getElementById' to fetch named elements directly. (Of course I ran into sites that don't name their elements, but fortunately many use named classes, so I had to fetch them that way, but I get ahead of myself.)

Let's get started. The following two lines is all that is required to fetch a remote URL synchronously on the server and then pull out a named element:

var doc = getDocumentFromURL("http://www.news.com/"); var item = doc.getElementById("mostPopStories");

Now that we have 'item' as the element we were trying to fetch, we just have to add that element to our current blank page. I created a simple function called 'addElementToPage(title, element)' that takes care of this for me. Here's the next line:

addElementToPage("News.com Popular Stories", item);

That's it. Now I do that 2 more times to fetch content from 2 other sites.

doc = getDocumentFromURL("http://ajaxian.com"); item = getElementsByClass('activitystream', doc)[0]; addElementToPage("Ajaxian Activity Stream", item); doc = getDocumentFromURL("http://www.washingtonpost.com/"); item = getElementsByClass("top-box-in", doc)[0]; addElementToPage("Washington Post", item);

You'll notice that I didn't use getElementById() as those elements were not named, but fortunately they had class names associated with them. I found a convenient function called getElementsByClass() that I used in this case. Since it returns an array of elements, I use the [0] index to retrieve the first item in the list, which in my case, is probably the only item.

Believe it or not, that's basically it. At this point, your three 'DOM fragments' have been fetched and inserted into your new document. Here's the result:

Following are the convenience functions that help make the magic happen. The first function is addElementToPage(). It very simply just creates an H2 tag and sets the title and a DIV tag which contains the contents of the fetched element:

function addElementToPage(title, element) { var el = document.importNode(element, true); var h2 = document.createElement('h2'); h2.innerHTML = title; document.body.appendChild(h2); var div = document.createElement('div'); div.appendChild(el); document.body.appendChild(div); }

This next function, getDocumentFromURL(), is the one that does most of the work. (I found some good info on the subject of HTML to DOM here: http://jszen.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-parse-html-strings-into-dom.html) It first goes and retrieves the remote page. Then it creates a 'document fragment' from the contents of the fetched site. That fragment is then added to a dynamically created IFRAME. Finally, the Document object from the IFRAME is fetched and returned. In short, we can pass in a URL, get the string value, place it into an IFRAME, then pull out the resulting Document object so that we can work on it.

function getDocumentFromURL(url) { // Get remote site var string = Jaxer.Web.get(url); // Parse the string into a doc fragment var range = document.createRange(); range.selectNode(document.body); var parsedHTML = range.createContextualFragment(string); // Create the iframe that will contain the site we loaded var iframe = document.createElement("iframe"); document.body.appendChild(iframe); // Import from doc fragment into the iframe var el = iframe.contentDocument.importNode(parsedHTML, true); iframe.contentDocument.body.appendChild(el); var newDoc = iframe.contentDocument; // delete the iframe as we don't need it any more document.body.removeChild(iframe); return newDoc; }

This final function was found at http://www.dustindiaz.com/getelementsbyclass/ and walks a node looking for an element with a specific class name. It was used in the case where elements don't have ID's, so a class name is used instead.

function getElementsByClass(searchClass, node, tag) { var classElements = new Array(); if (node == null) node = document; if (tag == null) tag = '*'; var els = node.getElementsByTagName(tag); var elsLen = els.length; var pattern = new RegExp("(^|\\\\s)" + searchClass + "(\\\\s|$)"); for (i = 0, j = 0; i < elsLen; i++) { if (pattern.test(els[i].className)) { classElements[j] = els[i]; j++; } } return classElements; }

What's exciting about this sample is that it is relatively simple, uses the full power of server-side JavaScript and more importantly, Jaxer's cool server-side DOM capability to enable real 'DOM scraping'. Once window object creation is finished in Jaxer (real soon now), then you'll be able to fetch remote pages, execute their integrated code, then proceed to fetch out items from the resulting DOM.

Update: see the Jaxer 1.0 version.

In this example, (the first in a series) we're going to build a simple voting tool, using a single page of DHTML. The implementation is quite basic but covers a good few examples of how to use Aptana Jaxer in real world situations, such as :

• Using Ajax libraries on the server (jQuery in this example)
• Server-side DOM manipulation (using jQuery)
• Storing and retrieving Session data
• Creating and accessing a database
• E4X as a templating mechanism (E4X provides native XML support in JavaScript)
• Handling form data

Let's Vote...

This example was written as a single page webapp. You could remove the Javascript to another file and make it all unobtrusive if that is what gets you excited, but I'm just using an inline script tag, as the code is only about 30 or so lines long. Also in Jaxer we could have easily implemented this using Jaxer's seamless ajax callback mechanism but for the purpose of this example we'll stick with a traditional form post.

Let's get started. Most folks reading this should be familiar with the standard blog/portal poll, where you are presented with a set of choices.

and once you have voted you get to see the current results of the voting.

In our example we allow multiple votes per user but you can easily change that by just commenting out a single line of code.

One of the interesting features of this application is that, by using server-side DOM manipulation in Jaxer, you can remove any unwanted content before it is sent to the client browser. We use this to hide the vote results until the user has voted

This is a useful technique for permission based forms where, for example, you may want remove the credit card details unless the user has established the correct permissions and been validated by the server.

A very basic web page

So let's jump in and have a look at the code used to make this work. The code in this article has been updated to use the API of Jaxer 0.9.8 or later, for The full source listing below contains comments to indicate where the code was changed to work with the later API.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Jaxer Poll</title> <script runat='server' src='jquery-compressed.js' autoload='true'></script> <style> #pollContainer { width: 600px; background: #eee; border: 3px solid #555; padding: 5px; font-size: 1em; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial; font-weight: 900; } #display { background: #ccc; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: 200; color: #2E3540; margin: 5px 0 5px 0; } TD { padding-left: 10px; } TD IMG { margin-left: -6px; } </style>

Above is the contents of the HEAD element. Just the usual suspects, setting the title and some simple CSS stuff. The only interesting part is at line #3, where we load the jQuery library on the server, because we intend to do some serverside DOM manipulation before the page is sent to the client.

The runat='server' attribute tells Jaxer to load this javascript library on the server.

The autoload attribute is a recent addition to Jaxer, and it instructs Jaxer to load that page and keep it cached as preparsed bytecode (for faster library loadtime) for any future calls to this page, including callbacks.

In the body of the document we have a simple form which we will dynamically populate on the server. The form will post the vote to itself on the server.

We are marking up the DOM content with the classnames 'voter' and 'nonvoter' to identify content that is specific to a user's status, and make it easily accessible using jQuery on the server.

<form id='pollContainer' method="POST" accept-charset="utf-8"> <div id='question'>What do you think is the coolest feature of Jaxer?</div> <div id='display'></div> <div class='nonvoter'><input type='submit' value='vote'></div><div id='voteTotals' class='voter'></div> </form>

Server Side Javascript

Now we get to the Javascript. The app has a single script tag in the body which is designated to run on the server.

The first dozen or so lines are simply creating a DB and preparing a schema for use.

var db = new Jaxer.DB.SQLite.createDB({PATH:Jaxer.Dir.resolve('poll.sqlite')}); db.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS votes (id, ip, vote)"); var questions = [ "Server-Side DOM","Server-Side Javascript","Seamless Ajax","I already know it!"]; var totalVotes = db.execute('SELECT count(*) FROM votes').singleResult - questions.length; if (totalVotes < 0) { questions.map(function(item, index) // seed the table with 1 row per question to avoid nulls { db.execute("INSERT INTO votes (id ,ip,vote) VALUES (?,?,?)", ""+index, '127.0.0.1', ""+index); }); totalVotes = 0; }

So we've connected to the database (which was automatically created if needed, how convenient!) and set up the schema and initial content we expect. We also setup an Array (questions) containing the questions for the voting poll

Next we need to check the session value we are storing (status) to determine whether this user has already voted, and then check to see if the form data for the vote is being posted. Then, if we are actually voting, we write the vote to the database and set the user status to 'voter'.

When we write the vote to the database, we grab the sessionID and the remote IP address and write those out with the vote data, this will let us enforce single voting later if we need it.

Finally query the database to get the current vote counts, remembering to subtract 1 from the total to account for the dummy rows we inserted to seed database and prevent any nulls from appearing in the results totals.

var status = Jaxer.session.status || 'nonvoter'; // look for request data and save vote if present if (Jaxer.request.data.hasOwnProperty('radioBtns') && status == 'nonvoter') { db.execute("INSERT INTO votes (id,ip,vote) VALUES (?,?,?) " , Jaxer.SessionManager.keyFromRequest() // session ID , Jaxer.request.remoteAddr // remote IP address , Jaxer.request.data.radioBtns // posted data ); status = 'voter'; totalVotes ++ ; } rs = db.execute('SELECT count(*)-1 AS tot FROM votes GROUP BY vote');

Now we build the DOM, to do this we issue a query to the DB to get the current vote tally.

Using E4X - ECMAScript For XML as a simple templating tool we create the DOM with the nodes populated according to our dataset.

One of the nice features of server-side javascript with Jaxer is that you have access to all neat things built into Mozilla without the worry of client side browser support, which enables reliable use of the advanced features of the Javascript language.

If you look closely at the code below you'll notice we use a simple syntax for variable substitution using curly braces containing javascript code inside the E4X assigments. This allows us to use this for templating as long as we are creating valid XML nodes.

var output = <table></table>; for (question in questions) { var percent = parseInt((rs.rows[question].tot / totalVotes) * 100); output.appendChild(<tr> <td class='nonvoter'><input type='radio' name='radioBtns' value={question}></td> <td>{questions[question]}</td> <td class='voter'> <img src="poll_l.png" height='16'> <img src="poll.png" height='16' width={percent * 2}> <img src="poll_r.png" height='16'></td> <td class='voter'>{rs.rows[question].tot}</td> <td class='voter'>({percent}%)</td> </tr>); } $('#display').html(output.toString()); $('#voteTotals').html(totalVotes + " votes");

So the document now has a DOM that has been populated with the content for BOTH voters and non-voters. We use a little jQuery magic to remove the elements we don't want presented to the user.

// remove DOM elements based on whether user has already voted $((status == 'voter') ? '.nonvoter' : '.voter').remove();

In this way the user will EITHER see the form with the question and the submit button

OR the current voting results data.

Now we set the session variable status to be the current status of the user as they have either voted or not.

Jaxer.session.status = status;

Finally as the page that is served has no further dependency on Jaxer once it leaves the server, we tell Jaxer to not bother injecting the client framework. Normally the client framework would be automatically inserted as a script tag in the outgoing HTML, but our simple example doesn't need to communicate back to the Jaxer server, as it contains no server callbacks.

// no need for the client Framework to be injected into the page Jaxer.response.setClientFramework();

So there you have it, a simple poll on a single page, using many of Jaxer's cool features.

Supporting Files

The full code and supporting files for this article are available here

Full Source Listing

<html> <head> <title>Jaxer Poll</title> <script runat='server' src='jquery-compressed.js' autoload='true'> </script> <style> #pollContainer { width: 600px; background: #eee; border: 3px solid #555; padding: 5px; font-size: 1em; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial; font-weight: 900; } #display { background: #ccc; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: 200; color: #2E3540; margin: 5px 0 5px 0; } TD { padding-left: 10px; } TD IMG { margin-left: -6px; } </style> </head> <body> <form id='pollContainer' method='POST' accept-charset='utf-8'> <div id='question'> What do you think is the coolest feature of Jaxer? </div> <div id='display'> </div> <div class='nonvoter'> <input type='submit' value='vote'/> </div> <div id='voteTotals' class='voter'> </div> </form> <script runat='server'> // for the beta version of Jaxer, change it to the following //var db = Jaxer.DB.SQLite.createDB({PATH:Jaxer.Dir.resolvePath('poll.sqlite')}); var db = Jaxer.DB.SQLite.createDB({PATH:Jaxer.Dir.resolve('poll.sqlite')}); db.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS votes (id, ip, vote)"); var questions = [ "Server-Side DOM" , "Server-Side Javascript" , "Seamless Ajax" , "I already know it!" ]; var totalVotes = db.execute('SELECT count(*) FROM votes').singleResult - questions.length; if (totalVotes < 0) { // seed the table with 1 row per question to avoid nulls questions.map(function(item, index) { db.execute("INSERT INTO votes (id ,ip,vote) VALUES (?,?,?)", ""+index, '127.0.0.1', ""+index); }); totalVotes = 0; } // remove the following line to limit to 1 vote per user session // for the beta version of Jaxer, change it to the following //Jaxer.session.remove('status'); delete Jaxer.session.status; // for the beta version of Jaxer, change the following line to //var status = Jaxer.session.get('status') || 'nonvoter'; var status = Jaxer.session.status || 'nonvoter'; // look for request data and save vote if present if ('radioBtns' in Jaxer.request.data && (status == 'nonvoter')) { db.execute("INSERT INTO votes (id,ip,vote) VALUES (?,?,?) " , Jaxer.SessionManager.keyFromRequest() // session ID , Jaxer.request.remoteAddr // remote IP address , Jaxer.request.data.radioBtns // posted data ); status = 'voter'; totalVotes ++ ; } rs = db.execute('SELECT count(*)-1 AS tot FROM votes GROUP BY vote'); var output = <table></table>; for (var question in questions) { var percent = parseInt((rs.rows[question].tot / totalVotes) * 100); output.appendChild( <tr> <td class='nonvoter'> <input type='radio' name='radioBtns' value={question}/> </td> <td>{questions[question]}</td> <td class='voter'> <img src="poll_l.png" height='16'/> <img src="poll.png" height='16' width={2+(percent * 2)}/> <img src="poll_r.png" height='16'/></td> <td class='voter'>{rs.rows[question].tot}</td> <td class='voter'>({percent}%)</td> </tr>); } $('#display').html(output.toString()); $('#voteTotals').html(totalVotes + " votes"); // remove DOM elements based on whether user has already voted $((status == 'voter') ? '.nonvoter' : '.voter').remove(); // for the beta version of Jaxer, change the following line to //Jaxer.session.set('status', status); Jaxer.session.status = status; // no need for the client Framework to be injected into the page. Jaxer.response.setClientFramework(); </script> </body> </html>

Attachment	Size
choices.png	7.09 KB
voted.png	7.61 KB
votepoll.zip	36.12 KB

Aptana Jaxer has been updated to 0.9.5 providing increased performance for server-side JavaScript and a host of other enhancements to make End-to-End Ajax development easier.

Aptana Studio users can get the latest via Help > Software Updates. Otherwise, download the latest now.

• Increased Performance
  • Aptana Jaxer's core is now based on Mozilla FireFox Beta3 and thus delivers improved JS performance and memory management.
  • Jaxer now pre-parses scripts to bytecode for faster execution during callbacks.
• More Natural JS Environment
  • Window and document objects on the server-side now parallel more closely how you work with them on the client-side. This means a more natural coding style with server-side JavaScript in Jaxer and a more browser compatible experience.
  • Jaxer no longer inlines external scripts to the page, this allows for correct use of browser cache on client side content and makes 'view source' a much more pleasant experience. This also applies to Jaxer's ClientFramework (the client-side JavaScript Jaxer puts in pages to facilitate callbacks and remote method invocation). Instead such external scripts are cachebusted with the buildnumber so that upgrading the server will automatically expire any old client side cache copies.
  • A new autoload feature has been added to allow for an entire script file to be cached server-side and reloaded on every regular and callback request. This is ideal for loading JavaScript libraries server-side. A configuration option is provided to expire the script every time the containing page is accessed, to ease development cycles -- this is the default config setting. See http://www.aptana.com/node/202 for a full example.
• Improved Platform Support
  • Significantly improved Unix support. Jaxer now builds and runs on Solaris too!
  • mySQL support is now also provided for Mac OSX
  • A number of Windows Vista security/UAC related problems have been addressed
• API Enhancements
  • Jaxer's file system API has been updated -- mostly around the 'quick' static method. For example: Jaxer.File.chmod('myfile.tx',0400)
  • A simple Stopwatch timer API now allows for timing measurements in code.

One of the common web tasks that always seems to involve a lot of arcane knowledge of backend systems, is how to upload files. Like most systems, Aptana Jaxer uses the post/receive model, where a web form is posted to the server, and the target of that form will receive and process the content. Where Jaxer makes this really easy is that it is all done with regular JavaScript and HTML. No special enviroment vars, excessive string processing, or finding handles to oddly named temp files is required.

All you need is a form to present to the user, which contains an input element of type upload, and an HTML page to receive the submitted form containing a "runat=server" script block that retrieves the data from the request. You could have the form and the recipient be the same page, however in this example I'll use two files for clarity. As an aside in Jaxer you can actually send the form directly to a JavaScript function living on the server but we'll look at that configuration in a future blog entry.

Example HTML Upload Form

This example upload form simply allows you to select up to 2 files for upload from the local filesystem. Pressing 'upload' posts the contents of that form to an HTML page containing the JavaScript shown later.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Upload </title> </head> <body> <form id='upload' action="submissions.html" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <input type="file" name="myFile1"><br> <input type="file" name="myFile2"><input type="submit" value='upload'> <p> 'upload' sends the selected file(s) to the server. </p> </form> </body> </html>

The form will look like the following when viewed in a browser. Pressing the browse button will present you with a file selection dialog, or you can type the path into the input box directly. I've used 2 file slots in this example to demostrate that the files passed in are available as part of an files array contained in the request object (a JavaScript representation of the HTTP request) and are accessed like any other JavaScript array.

Example Aptana Jaxer code to receive file uploads

To receive the data from the form when submitted we put some Jaxer code into the page the form will be submitted to. The code below should be in script block with a runat = 'server' attribute, which makes the code run serverside and doesn't present it to the client so you don't expose any serverside filenames or folder structures.

<script type='text/javascript' runat='server'> var message = ""; for (fileCount=0; fileCount<Jaxer.request.files.length; fileCount++) { var fileInfo = Jaxer.request.files[fileCount]; // prior to Jaxer 0.9.8 use // var destinationFilePath = Jaxer.Dir.resolvePath(fileInfo.originalFileName); var destinationFilePath = Jaxer.Dir.resolve(fileInfo.originalFileName); fileInfo.save(destinationFilePath); message += "<br>" + [ "Saved to : " + destinationFilePath , "original filename : " + fileInfo.originalFileName , "temp filename : " + fileInfo.tempFileName , "contentType : " + fileInfo.contentType , "size : " + fileInfo.fileSize ].join("<br>"); } document.write(message); </script>

The data posted by the form is available within the Jaxer.request object.

For the purposes of this example we are specifically interested in the Jaxer.request.files array which contains an array of Jaxer.Request.FileInfo objects, one for each file posted with the form.

The Jaxer.Request.FileInfo object contains some useful properties describing the file, such as fileName, contentType, etc.

Uploading two files from my filesystem from the form in this example would return a page of output like below. We have uploaded the file to same location as the submission.html file used as the form action in the originating HTML.

Saved to : C:\aptana\JaxerDev\public\work\bar.txt
original filename : bar.txt
temp filename : C:\aptana\JaxerDev\tmp\tmp
contentType : text/plain
size : 15754
Saved to : C:\aptana\JaxerDev\public\work\foo.txt
original filename : foo.txt
temp filename : C:\aptana\JaxerDev\tmp\tmp-1
contentType : text/plain
size : 816

Well that's really all there is to it. It's simple and easy and you never have to think about anything other than HTML and Javascript.

API docs for the FileInfo object and the Jaxer.Request object are available online.

Next week Aptana will be at AjaxWorld (NYC), iPhone Developer Summit (NYC), and EclipseCon (Silicon Valley). Join us. We want to meet you, answer your questions, and get your feedback and ideas to make Aptana Studio and Aptana Jaxer even better for you. (Of course you can do that anytime via our ASAP enhancement request system too).

AjaxWorld, March 18-20, New York, NY
Kevin Hakman presents Aptana Studio: Your Unfair Advantage for AJAX, iPhone, Adobe AIR, PHP and Rails Development and Rapid Development of Enterprise Ajax Apps both on Wednesday, March 19.

iPhone Developer Summit, March 18-20, New York, NY
Also on Wednesday March 19, Kevin Hakman presents Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.

EclipseCon, March 17-19, Santa Clara, CA
Eclipse Monkey committer and Aptana engineer Ingo Muschenetz shares Building Eclipse-based Products: A View From the Trenches on March 18, and Aptana engineer Kevin Sawicki delivers Pimp My Editor with insights for extending and customizing features in Eclipse.

We'll also be at the EclipseCon Ajax focused Birds of a Feather meeting -- check the schedule for details.

I'm happy to announce that RadRails 1.0 has been released today. This release has been a long time coming and includes a lot of new features and polish. We're especially proud of the progress we've made here at Aptana since we took over the project. RadRails 0.7.2 users will definitely want to check out this new release - it offers a more stable environment, full Rails 2.0 support, support for JRuby, and a boatload of new features. For those who want the comprehensive list of changes since the 0.9.3 release, you can find the changelist in ASAP.

The highlights include:

• A new Rails Shell console - A screencast dedicated to this feature is available at aptana.tv.
• Bundled auto-installing gems for rails development
• A Ruby profiler for Pro users
• An RDoc preview view
• Extended RHTML/ERb color preferences
• Code completion for ActiveRecord model fields and finders
• Code completion suggesting method call arguments
• Significant expansion of code warnings and analysis, including syntax changes from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9
• An improved look and feel

These new features join an already impressive set of functionality:

• A Fast Ruby debugger
• RHTML, YML, HTML, JS, and CSS editors with code assist.
• Unit testing integration and GUI
• Refactoring
• Code analysis and warnings
• IDE Scriptable via Ruby
• Much, much more!

Please note that unless you've been using 1.0.0 nightlies Aptana/Eclipse will not automatically update you to 1.0. You'll need to force an install of RadRails 1.0 via the Start Page, Plugins Manager, or Software update mechanism that you used to initially install RadRails. For those who prefer to use the Software Update route, the update site URL for RadRails is: http://update.aptana.com/update/rails/3.2/

Yesterday Adobe announced the availability of Adobe AIR 1.0. At the same time, Aptana released the Adobe AIR plugin for Aptana Studio which simplifies development of Ajax applications that run "on AIR". (Adobe AIR Plugin for Aptana Studio)

If you are not familiar with Adobe AIR, it enables you to use the skills and Web technologies you already know, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to write applications that can be deployed to the Windows and Mac desktop, and shortly on Linux desktops too.

And what is Aptana Jaxer, you ask? Jaxer is an Ajax server that enables you to leverage those same Web skills and technologies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to write server-side code and do a whole new range of things with JavaScript like interact with databases, file systems, and remote data sources, do server-side DOM manipulations, cross-domain data calls, make socket connections, and call server-side JavaScript functions from the client-side, plus lots more. Yes, you write both client and server code using HTML and Ajax. You can even write entire web applications in a single HTML file if you wish.

With that said, it becomes much clearer as to what ‘Jaxer on AIR’ is all about -- two systems that enable you to leverage your Ajax skills for building desktop and server apps, unified into a single, very interesting model. With Jaxer you can implement your server-side to know if an app is running in AIR and thus take advantage of offline synchronization and local access to the client system as permitted, or if you’re running on the Web with a subset of the total potential features of your Ajax apps and Web pages.

I did a 10-minute screencast showing a simple example of this. I take one of Jack Slocum’s great Ext / Adobe AIR demos (EXT Tasks Demo) and Jaxer-enabled it. I added a single JavaScript function that can query my backend database, and I use the results to fill the user interface.

This demo just scratches the surface of what is possible, but I hope it opens the doors to your thinking about how to utilize these great technologies – it’s my version of their chocolate and our peanut-butter happily together, enjoy!

View 'Jaxer on AIR' Screencast

We are excited to announce that Kevin Hakman has joined Aptana to head up marketing and developer community programs. Kevin is a recognized leader in the Ajax community. Long before the term "Ajax" was coined, Kevin was pioneering single page web application concepts via the company he co-founded, General Interface Corp., one of the first enterprise Ajax libraries and visual development tools companies. General Interface Corp. went on to be acquired by TIBCO Software in 2004 as a compliment the company's service-oriented architecture (SOA) products. Today TIBCO General Interface is used by many Fortune-scale companies for rapid Web application development and deployment atop their XML and SOAP data sources.

In addition to his historic role on the steering committee of the OpenAjax Alliance, Kevin currently chairs the organization's integrated development environment working group. The OpenAjax Alliance IDE Working Group which includes Adobe, Aptana, the Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, TIBCO and others is now close to delivering a draft specification for a uniform way to describe Ajax libraries and controls and thus streamline the ability to use Ajax libraries within your development tools of choice. Kevin is a frequent speaker at Ajax industry events and is an author to many published articles on Ajax in the enterprise.

This past week we released another point release of Jaxer, version 0.9.3, updating the standalone server as well as the one packaged within Aptana Studio. Of course there were bug fixes, performance improvements, and API enhancements. Perhaps most important, this was our first release to officially support Linux. Supporting Linux isn't trivial because of the multitude of variants, but it is very strategic as the deployment platform of choice for many people. Look for more distros being supported and more forms of distribution, from buildable source drops to tarballs and installable packages and even to complete EC2 and VMWare images. And thanks to the community for already helping us with supporting Linux distros.

So where are these releases leading — what are some things on the immediate roadmap for Jaxer?

• An even more Ajax-y experience: the callback environment will be made more natural, server-side support for Ajax libraries will expand, mashups will be easier to implement, etc.
• Scalability and performance: we'll release some interesting benchmarks on current Jaxer performance and stability, illustrate how it scales, and make some significant improvements.
• More APIs: we'll make database, file, network, and native interfaces more powerful while maintaining clean APIs that feel at home in JavaScript and HTML.
• More integration: we're creating a true bridge to Java by leveraging DWR (Direct Web Remoting) server-side, in addition to our current support for Tomcat (and other servlet containers); we'll expand the list of supported web servers from the current Apache 2.x and Jetty to IIS, Apache 1.3, and perhaps others; and we'll work on other database drivers.
• Deployment: we're working on making one-click deployment a reality, so you can develop your Ajax apps in Studio, leveraging Jaxer for the server side, and click to deploy your app to a hosted, managed, monitored, and scalable environment.
• Tooling: How about seamless end-to-end debugging of your Ajax app — step through your program starting on the server, move to the browser, go back to the server for a callback, then back to the browser for processing the result...
• Real-world apps: in the spirit of eating our own dog food, and supporting dog food consumption in the community, look for complete applications written on Jaxer and en expansion of our web site and of Studio so you can share your snippets, samples, projects and applications.

Oh, and the time frame? We're not exactly the patient type, so for many of these think weeks rather than months. Want something specific to come out even faster? Join the discussions on the forums, join the effort (some folks are supporting Linux distros, others are building persistence frameworks, some are putting together samples), or join our team.

The Jaxer Team is proud to announce that we now support Jaxer for several Linux platforms:

• Ubuntu
• CentOS
• Fedora

To learn how to get up and running on Linux, see the Jaxer Standalone Installation guide for Linux.

We've been working with volunteer beta testers within the Jaxer community to bring you these distros, and we plan to support additional distros in the future. However, this is our initial release for Linux support and because the various Linux platforms have so many nuances, some Linux platforms could likely still have some issues. Our Linux support is very community driven, so we invite you to participate in the platform vote on the forums to voice your opinion about your preferred platform:

http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?t=4844

If you have Jaxer up and running on a platform that we have not listed, let us know so we can add it to the list of supported platforms. Additionally, if you need help troubleshooting issues with Jaxer on your Linux platform, post your questions on the Jaxer forums.

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...

With the excitement of the 0.9 release of Jaxer and the Aptana Studio 1.1 release behind them, the Aptana development team spent the past week working on the first patch release for 0.9/1.1. The Aptana community should have access to these patches early next week.

New Release

The upcoming Aptana Studio 1.1 release will be a patch release that fixes several bugs in 1.1, including the following issues:

• An encoding bug where workspace text encoding isn't saved after re-starting Aptana (STU-1111)
• A bug involving CSS pseudo classes (STU-1035)
• A bug in Prototype code assist involving the $() function(STU-134)

Tips and Tricks

We're aware that some users have been having difficulty installing the recent updates to Aptana Studio. The team is working on isolating the causes of this issue and hope to improve the situation soon. In the meantime, if you have been unable to download/install the updates, try performing a manual installation as directed on the update site:

http://update.aptana.com/update/3.2/

Community Buzz

We see a lot of bug reporting and feature requests on the forums; however, the best way to get support or to request a new feature is to fill out a ticket in ASAP

http://support.aptana.com/issues/

By filing a ticket in ASAP, you enable us to track the status of a ticket more easily, and you can also easily search for related bugs and feature requests.

Next Week

Next week, we'll get started with work on the 1.2 release. Current plans for the 1.2 release include a number of updates to the Ajax libraries bundled with Aptana Studio (EXT, Yahoo UI, etc.) and a migration to the Eclipse 3.3 platform as the base platform for Aptana.

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