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Aptana Jaxer or sliced bread?February 19th, 2008 | by Jevgeni Kabanov | |
Sometimes a technology appears that is just so damn cool you are amazed. More often than not the ideas behind it can be quite simple.
Aptana Jaxer is exactly such a technology. There is nothing new about having a server-side API. There is nothing new about building applications in HTML and JavaScript. The genius part is running Mozilla engine on the server-side and having access to full server resources from the browser via a controlled environment with no extra layers.
As far as I understood the communication between server and client is done by:
- DOM updates are seamlessly propagated from the server to the client
- Function calls can be proxied to call to the server. All marshalling is done automagically
This pretty much means that code runs seamlessly in a mixed, secure environment.
Although the “runat” attribute that controls whether code is run server-side or client-side can be a bit unlogical at first, the setup can allow to build powerful applications with only one (count it, one) technology — HTML and JavaScript. And this is the technology you have to use anyway to even deploy something on the web.
Of course “the one technology” suffers from being dynamically typed and generally known for its quirkiness, but with JavaScript 2.0 support on the way to Mozilla and good IDE support (which Aptana is in a good position to provide) this technology might yet give a fresh meaning to the word web application.
An interesting question I’d like to ask from the Aptana developers is if we can add a third environment to the mix — desktop applications? Having the same API to use on the server, in the browser and (with less restrictions) on the desktop could give Adobe AIR a run for their money.