It’s been awhile since I’ve made any mention of Jaxer, and for good reason. The Jaxer team at Aptana has been hard at work getting Jaxer ready for 1.0 Release. That day has come, and I’m proud the first publicly available version of Jaxer 1.0: Jaxer 1.0 RCB. As far as functionality goes, this release is pretty much feature-complete, and we just need some people to kick the tires a bit before we officially tag it as 1.0.

So, what’s new in this version of Jaxer? Quite a bit, actually, and if you’ve been using 0.9x releases of Jaxer until now, a lot has changed for you as well. As usual, Jaxer is available bundled into studio (starting with the recently released 1.2 version), as well as the usual stand-alone. Read on for a full summary of what’s new…

So, here’s a quick run-down of the shiny new version of Jaxer:

  • 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

Pretty cool stuff, huh? What’s really exciting to me (outside the functionality that was already there previously, such as database and filesystem access), is the ability to return custom content types, specifically JSON. JSON returns are nice since the server-side is already natively JavaScript, as well as the fact that this means creating JSON data services for your existing apps becomes a snap. If JSON’s not your cup of tea (and you’re crazy if it isn’t), or perhaps you need to deal with XML for whatever reason, the E4X (native XML for JS) support being baked in is also nice. This essentially means that you can use Jaxer as a JSON or XML service provider to not only Ajax clients, but other things like flash / flex, Silverlight, and more. Writing your own RESTful API in JavaScript = crazy delicious!

Another interesting feature that I have yet to play with personally is the new secure sandbox. What this essentially lets you do is load pages (or page fragments) on the server from other domains and let their JS execute without giving them access to the Jaxer API, or any of your other server-side code. Why is this neat, you may ask? Well, if you are aggregating content from a site (news.com in several of the Jaxer samples), the content you’re retrieving may have some JS code that could get evaluated. Before the sandbox existed, this meant a bunch of JS errors would bubble up to the client-side related to this JS code. No longer… and obviously this is also important as it means nobody could try and compromise your system by modifying the content you fetch to try and execute destructive statements (i.e. “DROP DATABASE”). Obviously, there’s a lot of room for neat mash-ups with this new goodness, and Uri Sarid has written a nice article on DOM Scraping with Jaxer.

I hope to be cooking up some new articles related to this release in the coming days, and will definitely be covering this stuff in my upcoming speaking engagements. For now, enjoy these links: