brentashley

The state of the art of web development has taken a leap forward recently with the announcement of Jaxer, Aptana‘s new Javascript-on-the-server environment which allows you to write a web app as a single item, without having to devote much time and brainpower towards most of the distinction between what is run at the server and what is run at the browser.

My application stack diagram from the Ajax Summit back in 2005 shows how early Ajax applications had to take it upon themselves to perform the drudgery of remote procedure call invocation, encoding and packaging, the transport layer, decoding, dispatch and then the encoding, packaging, sending, receiving, decoding and consumption of the response package.

Three years later, Aptana’s diagrams show how far they have brought us forward with their advanced client libraries and server technology that have abstracted away all of the remote procedure calls and data marshalling, making the gap between client and server much, much less of a chasm.

Jaxer is not some net new unknown – it’s built on the Mozilla Javascript and rendering engine. It’s open source licensed under the GPL. It’s backed by Aptana, whose eclipse-based IDE tool is a well known market leader, and whose Advisory Board is absolutely packed with the very top names in the Ajax sphere.

As John Resig points out in his coverage of Jaxer, this is an exciting piece of technology, and I would go as far as to say it has the potential to be a game-changing development.