Installing Aptana Jaxer on Ubuntu

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Jaxer, and it’s a shame, because there’s been a lot of major changes over the past several months. Anyway, I’ve been getting back into server-side javascript hacking, and found myself needing to get Jaxer up and running on a local dev server (and subsequently this one). You could also always work with Jaxer in Aptana’s cloud, where you’d get all the benefits of Jaxer integration with Aptana Studio and deployment workflows (SVN, staging, production, and just plain awesomeness) if you don’t want to (or need to) install Jaxer yourself. However, my needs (and presumably yours) required me to go down this route.

So, before we get started, let’s go over the list of prerequisites and assumptions:

• You’re on Ubuntu 8.04 (newer versions should work the same as well)
• You’ve got Apache installed (via aptitude, or you will have to adjust paths accordingly)
• You’ve got root access to your server

That’s about it. MySQL is also good to have, but not required. Last thing before we start: many of the steps outlined here came from this site, which was contributed by a Jaxer user at Aptana’s forums. Right, let’s get busy…

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Hello Gen-X-Design

Hi all.

This is just a short post to introduce myself. The talented Mr Selby has kindly invited me on board to blog about my experiences with mad scientist level JavaScript.

My names Davey and I work with Ian at Aptana, my role there is JavaScript Architect and as I result I spend a lot of time rooting around in the arcane depths of spidermonkey. I’m predominately interested in the topic of server side JS as it appears in our Jaxer product but occasionally venture out into the hostile environment that exists on the client.

I have an article primed and ready to go, but just need to put some finishing touches to it before publishing, In it I explore how to reproduce some of the interesting PHP capabilities that Ian is the master of. So it you have ever wanted to have the equivalent of __FILE__ or the __autoload function in javascript, keep watching all will be revealed soon.

As a first tip to any would-be JavaScript ninja, I heartily recommend The Douglas Crockford book ‘JavaScript, the good parts’, it’s just choc full o’ goodness.

cheers

Server-Side JavaScript Talk Slides & Source

It’s well overdue, but I’ve finally managed to get this stuff up. Here are the slides from my presentation on Server-Side JavaScript, as well as the source code for the Jaxer REST API provider and consumers that I wrote.

I will do a post in the near future going over the code, and some of the configuration tweaks that I made, but hopefully this will hold you over until then.

Source Code

Jaxer 1.0 Now Available (RC B)

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…

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Server-Side JavaScript – All the Cool Kids Are Doing It!

That’s right kids, I’m speaking at the 6th International AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo! I’ll be giving a session on server-side javascript, and how it will make your life better, your apps cooler, and your friends jealous!

Read the full entry for details on the session, but here’s a little introductory overview (for the sake of not re-writing everything, I have just copied and pasted the announcement)…

Server-side JavaScript (SSJS) is growing in popularity fast since developers realize it can drastically simplify Web app creation by letting you use using the same technology stack on both the client and the server. While server-side JavaScript is not new – it was a part of Netscape’s vision 10 years ago – times have significantly changed with 10x faster hardware and networks, making that original vision for the Web now a reality.

In this session delegates will learn how to:

• Overcome common hurdles and pitfalls of client-side only JavaScript development.
• Speed up development time by cutting out extra server-side code and processing scripts that are no longer necessary.
• Clean up your code base by reducing (or even eliminating) the number of languages needed to leverage to accomplish common tasks (i.e. Why bother with server-side PHP scripts to fetch database results when you can do it all in JavaScript on the server? Why mess with Curl to fetch content that your JavaScript code can grab in one line?)

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