An introduction to Jaxer - the worlds first ajax server

I don't think many people have heard of Aptana's Jaxer. I only found it by pure chance, but once I started to read about it I was hooked. What a great idea - an ajax server that gives you the ability to write an entire ajax application in one language, Javascript.

Jaxer takes the power of the Mozilla engine, that's the engine that powers Firefox, and embeds it into a web server. This means that you can do do full javascript processing, using all of the DOM APIs that you would normally use on a browser, as well as Javascript libraries like jQuery and Dojo, directly on the server.

Jaxer operates as an output filter which means you can use it in conjunction with any existing server side processing you might already have (php, python etc). But once you get started with Jaxer you might realize that you have no need for the other languages. Jaxer comes with full support for accessing databases, filesystems and network sockets and really is a one-stop ajax solution.

<div id="myDiv"></div>
<script runat"server">
  myDiv.innerHTML = "The page was generated at:" + new Date();
</script>

Jaxer provides a special runat attribute for the standard html <script> tag. This allows you to specify where the contained code should run - at the client, on the server, or both. Ajax functionality can simply be embedded into a single page.

<script runat"server-proxy">
  function getData() {
    Jaxer.DB.execute('SELECT * FROM NEWS');
  }
</script>
<a onClick="alert(getData());">get news</a>

I've been using Jaxer for several months now and am very impressed with what it's capable of - I would highly recommend it for anybody looking to develop an ajax application.  To get started with Jaxer I would recommend reading the following, all of which were a great help to me when I was first getting started:

• Jaxer project home page
  Download Jaxer from the projects home page.
• Getting Started with Jaxer in Aptana Studio
  The official documentation has several example based learning exercises.
• Javascript & MySQL With Jaxer
  A great introduction with a complete step by step example to get you started.