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…

(more…)

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?)

(more…)

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could work with MySQL within your JavaScript code? Think about it, you wouldn’t have to spend extra time writing extra server-side code for connecting to, querying, and parsing results, you could just write a little bit more code in your JavaScript and be done with it. Of course, we wouldn’t want any of this SQL exposed to the end-user, as that would be a major security issue, but what if that problem was solved as well? You might also raise the point that you’d still need the ability to prepare your SQL statements that take dynamic input to prevent SQL injection attacks, but if that weren’t an issue, wouldn’t that be awesome as well?

Seriously, take a look over an existing AJAX app you may have written. You’ve probably got a bunch of different functions for making AJAX calls to PHP scripts (or something similar), which process the input, and deal with the database, then return either parsed results, or results to be parsed by JavaScript. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could consolidate all that stuff into some smaller, simpler JavaScript code? Fewer files, less overhead… sounds good to me.

That’s one of the great things about Jaxer. If you’ve done any reading, you probably know that Jaxer works with SQLite out of the box, and you might be aware that it’s also able to work with MySQL, but most of the people I’ve talked to have stopped there. Aside from the above objections (which I’ll smash shortly ;)), I’ve also heard that they simply don’t want to learn another complex API. Well, the time for silly excuses is over, and I’m going to show you how easy all this stuff can be. I would suggest that you first set up Jaxer with XAMPP so you can follow along, but if you want to use the stand-alone Jaxer and Apache, you’ll be just fine. Let’s get our hands dirty…
(more…)

Being that I just started my new job at Aptana, one of the first things they asked me to do is learn everything I can about Jaxer and to document that process. For those of you who don’t know yet, Jaxer is essentially and AJAX server. The very long story short is that you now have the ability to run JavaScript on the server-side (no more cross-site restrictions!), and along with that ability you get some pretty kick-ass API functionality that isn’t normally an inherent part of JS (such as built-in filesystem or database functionality). Essentially, you can now write the better part, if not all of your web apps in JavaScript. What’s even cooler is that you don’t need to give up the technologies that you currently use in order to implement Jaxer. I’ll be writing on how you can blend all these new and existing technologies in the near future (perhaps even make my screen-casting debut), but for now I want to talk about how to get Jaxer set up with an existing Apache install, specifically an XAMPP-based development environment.

Granted you can download a stand-alone Jaxer+Apache bundle, but if you’re like me, you want to be able to start seeing how it plays with existing web technologies (for me, that would be PHP). The other thing that you’ve probably already got (if you’re like me) is a test / development environment locally, and it’s most likely XAMPP (or something similar). Finally, if you’re slightly OCD like me, you like to have everything in one place, all nice and organized. Well, you’re in luck, because I’m going to show you how to get all of this goodness up and running. My examples will be for a Mac install of XAMPP, but the Windows / Linux methods will be pretty darned close. The only caveat with this walk-through is that it is written based on the upcoming 0.9.5 release (which will be out within the next week or so), and this is because it covers some important changes from the 0.9.4 releases. Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s get into how we can get all this up and running. Read on…
(more…)