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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Dynamically Add Functions to PHP Classes

I’m in the process of working on the new version of my PHP Thumbnailer class, and came across a couple of interesting challenges. I’ve gotten a lot of great suggestions for features, and have wanted to add them, but at the same time don’t as I would prefer not to bloat the class with all sorts of functionality. So I started thinking about how I could provide certain functionality for people that want it, without either simply making it a part of the class (and making it more bloated as a result), or coming up with all sorts of extended classes to maintain and distribute. The other thing I don’t want to do is end up creating an app… I want this thing to be a small library. Finally, I want people to be able to integrate the library / classes into their existing apps as easily as possible. The solution (or paradigm I suppose) that jumped out was plugins. Ah, but how does one create plugins for classes? Rather, how do you dynamically add functions to PHP classes? Well, after some googling and tinkering, I think I’ve come up with the solution. Read on to see how it’s done…

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Quickie – Aptana 2009 Roadmap Survey

Just a quick post letting everyone know that we’re asking the developer community for their input on the Aptana Studio…. what do you like, what do you hate, and what do you want. Per the survey page:

We want to make Aptana Studio better for YOU.

To do that, we need to understand what you do, how you work, what you like about Studio, and what drives you nuts. Whether you’re a regular Studio user or you’ve only tried it once or twice, we want to know what’s working for you and what’s not, what features you can’t find, and what features you can’t live without.

From now until January 10, you can help us determine our direction for the next year and beyond by taking a few minutes to give us your thoughts.

Take a few minutes and share your thoughts:
2009 Aptana User Survey

Aptana PHP 1.0 Released – Free PHP IDE

Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we’ve been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects. I would also say this regardless of the fact that I work for the company… it really is that good! Read on to find out about all the new goodness…

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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