Javascript - Still Object-Oriented

Since recently stumbling upon POW - the incredible Plain Old Webserver plugin for Firefox, I’ve been looking at Server-Side Javascript implementations. Here are some rambling thoughts.

Jaxer from Aptana is a full featured AJAX server that’s integrated with the Aptana IDE - WOW! If they find a way to make hosting for this cheap and easy to set up it’s going to be a barn burner. Until then though, Jaxer provides a next level of capability beyond POW wrt turning your pc into a powerful peer. As exciting as POW is, running under Firefox there’s no way to get really good uptime under the best of circumstances and I wouldn’t be shocked to find it chewing up huge amounts of memory if left running for extended periods.

AppJet is an interesting hosted service but it’s not clear what their business model will be going forward.

Looking at all this good stuff had me feeling like I really need to get to Part 2 of AJAX and the New Web: Back to the Future Again but then I came across this great cartoon - The Development Circle of Life which gives me til 2010 - LOL

I got a small performance boost on my main machine and decided to load Aptana to see if I could tell the difference. Although eventually I’ll just have to get more RAM, Aptana now feels responsive enough for regular use. I’m also now after two weeks pretty comfortable with the AIR environment so I’m taking Aptana off the back burner. It’s also been updated to support ExtJS directly. If you’re a Mac person and are interested in a free performance boost read on.

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After taking it for a spin, I’ve decided to set Aptana aside for the moment. It’s too big to fit comfortably into my current environment. With Aptana running, having lots of browser tabs open, along with Second Life isn’t feasable without a hw upgrade. I’ll do it, but for now I want to learn AIR deeply and dealing with Aptana/ExtJS/AIR integration/configuration is scattering my efforts/attention. It was cool to quickly create desktop apps with Aptana so I’m happy I started there but doing things from scratch is a good way to get understanding. I can’t remember the last time I set a PATH environmental variable! Yeah, I’ll be glad to get back to Aptana

While evaluating Adobe’s Integrated Runtime(AIR - formerly code-named Apollo), I was led to Aptana the self-proclaimed “Web IDE” that supports AIR via plugin. As a long-time Smalltalker, I started out with very mixed feelings about living inside a static box within another static box but after some simple coding and looking at screencasts I have to say that the integration of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and Ruby is compelling. The unified debugger makes it easy to be tolerant of the lurking, clunky Javaness. I’m close to convincing myself that if I close my eyes for a moment and imagine that the OS has disappeared and Java has taken it’s place, everything will work out just fine. AIR enables me to create web-aware, cross-platform, AJAXed, SQLite-aware, double-clickable applications and since Aptana is Eclipse-based, I can rhythmeer with IBM Jazz! Although it’s taken a long road with many unexpected turns, perhaps Java is going to become a ubiquitous platform - at least for development.