Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Prototyping AJAX with Jaxer and jQuery

So where did October go? Amazon kindly delivered a bunch of great books. So far I'm part way through C# in Depth and jQuery in Action, both Manning books and good reading. As a developer it can be difficult to find books pitched at the right level and at least with these two books Manning got pretty close to the sweet spot.


Fortunately the biggest impact on my tech time apart from family is the three months work I've begun for a local SaaS outfit, TenderLink.com (which is involved in tendering, not online dating). The work I'm doing is confidential but I wanted to talk about the tools I'm using for prototyping: Aptana Studio, Jaxer, and jQuery.


So who isn't using jQuery, hell even Microsoft is getting in on the fun. If you're using jQuery you may have heard of Aptana. From their website:


Aptana is about cutting-edge infrastructure for modern, Ajax-based web applications. We already have the leading Ajax IDE in the market (roughly 2 million downloads).

Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse and you can either download the full application or if you're already using Eclipse, just download the plugin. Aptana Studio has great support for writing JavaScript code. If you've ever had to write JavaScript using the likes of older versions of Visual Studio you'll know that JavaScript, despite being the dynamic part of DHTML, has been a second class citizen for a long time. Aptana Studio really gives you the tools you would expect in order to be productive writing JavaScript, including support for all the major JavaScript frameworks. Aptana Studio is free open source software.


Aptana also integrate their Jaxer server product into Aptana Studio which has some really great possibilities. Jaxer is referred to as the world's first AJAX server. It's not necessarily a misnomer but the buzzword compliance doesn't begin to describe what a cool product it is. It uses the Mozilla engine so you get the latest versions of Mozilla JavaScript. And by tagging your script element with the runat="server" attribute your familiar JavaScript code gets executed at the server. For the work I'm doing I'm leaning heavily on jQuery to handle the UX. The server-side will ultimately be provided by the Jade enterprise object database. But for prototyping my jQuery client user experience, the Aptana Studio/Jaxer combination is exceptional.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey David,

Davey from Aptana here, we'd love to hear what you are doing with Jaxer and the IDE to help you prototype apps.

If you want to tell the story send me a PM or post on our forums.

glad to hear it's working we for you.

cheers
davey

David Clarke said...

Thanks Davey, sorry it's taken so long to respond. Time is in short supply and our nearly 2 year old has moved from his cot into a bed. He loves the bed but keeping him in it just isn't easy. I am planning another post and I'm really enjoying working with Jaxer and Studio, awesome tools.