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Aptana has announced the release of its AJAX server, Aptana Jaxer 1.0, and the introduction of Jaxer Pro.
Aptana provides a Web development, deployment and management suite that includes AJAX, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Python support. Kevin Hakman, director of evangelism for Aptana, said Jaxer embeds the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser engine within a server so that developers can have the same execution environment on the application server that they have in the Web browser. Jaxer Pro provides the same technology under a commercial license with support from Aptana.
Jaxer 1.0 is also now available in Aptana Cloud, a scalable application hosting and lifecycle management service from Aptana, Hakman said.
Jaxer enables developers to use JavaScript on the server to interact with databases, file systems and networks, and provides server sessions and image manipulation. Aptana also said Jaxer enables popular AJAX libraries such as jQuery, Prototype, Dojo and others to run on the server. And Jaxer provides a full HTML DOM (Document Object Model) to enable modification and personalization of Web pages before they are served to the browser.
“Jaxer is easily the most exciting piece of JavaScript technology to arrive in a long time,” John Resig, JavaScript evangelist for Mozilla and creator of the popular jQuery AJAX library, said in a statement.
Developers using Jaxer can easily include both client-side and server-side code in the same HTML page, and Jaxer simplifies AJAX communications, Hakman said.
Jaxer also helps to simplify the creation of REST (Representational State Transfer) data services for consumption by AJAX applications or widgets for social networking systems like Facebook and OpenSocial, and can work with Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, both of which support the JavaScript language, the company said. In addition, Jaxer natively supports JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and XML.
Jaxer 1.0 is available under a free, open-source license and can be downloaded here. Jaxer Pro licenses and subscriptions can be purchased through the Aptana Store on the company’s Web site.
“All the ways that Jaxer simplifies Web development seem so obvious given their immediate utility and ease. The only reason they have not been done before is because application servers and Web browsers have never had the same native set of technologies before,” Paul Colton, CEO and founder of Aptana, said in a statement. “The idea of Jaxer, that a server could be just like a Web browser from a Web developer’s point of view, is a natural evolution of Web technologies.”
And Aptana CTO Uri Sarid said, “We’ve made Jaxer’s benchmarks public on our Web site and are pleased to announce that they are in the same range as those for PHP and Ruby on Rails, other very popular Web platforms that Aptana supports as well. We are very pleased with the performance Jaxer delivers.”
Aptana Cloud
Meanwhile, on Oct. 21, Aptana announced the general availability of Aptana Cloud, an online service that integrates with Eclipse Foundation software development tools for hosting, scaling and managing Web applications in the cloud, Hakman said.
Aptana Cloud provides a complete end-to-end solution for deploying, scaling, staging, managing and monitoring Web sites and Internet applications, according to the company. Colton said with a few clicks users can deploy to scalable open-source application platforms, including PHP, MySQL, Apache and Aptana Jaxer.
“Aptana Cloud helped us deploy our application faster than expected,” said Shawn Jonnet, chief software architect and co-founder of King Pearl, a technology consulting company specializing in health care.
Added Hakman:
“Aptana Cloud goes way beyond the utility model of providing raw computing cycles and storage as a service. Customers choose Aptana Cloud because it not only scales on demand, but also because it uniquely has additional services that streamline the entire development, deployment and management cycle for Web applications. The result is the ultimate in ease and efficiency-a complete solution that puts the power of cloud computing to work for you costing far less to operate than doing it yourself.“
Aptana Cloud’s entry-level pricing is 4 cents an hour, Hakman said. Higher scalability services start at 5 cents an hour per 256MB of allocated RAM and the costs go down per unit as users scale up, he said. Interested parties can look here to learn more about Aptana Cloud.