Aptana Journal

Aptana released Jaxer: the first ever Ajax server... you got that right, server-side Ajax ... the concept is pretty interesting, a server-side API that wraps for client-side Ajax app to better optimize it and allows you to interface with the file system and database.... Oh, wait a minute, isn't this really similar to AIR? AIR also extends for your JavaScript libraries to allow file system and database access, except that AIR is a client desktop runtime and Jaxer is a server runtime... nevertheless, they solve the same problem... They allow you to leverage existing JavaScript skills to integrate seamlessly with components that will allow you to deploy full apps without the need of any traditional server-side programming language.

I always thought Aptana was just a nice Eclipse plugin, but this is pretty innovative. It integrates for your Apache web server as a simple extension (no IIS for now), it deploys as a war file for your Apache Tomcat Java server, or even runs in Amazon EC2 ...

I personally haven't tried it, and I have no complaints about ColdFusion, .NET, PHP, or Ruby processing my server requests, in fact, I believe they would be much more robust and reliable than server-side JavaScript, however, this looks great for small and light applications. I'm sure that's their first niche since the only two supported databases are sqlite and mysql, it's a good indicative ...

Anyone see a good immediate use for this new technology?