Aptana, which makes tools for the development and deployment of Web applications, is adding two Web application gurus to the company.
On July 27, Aptana CEO Paul Colton posted a blog entry stating that two AJAX experts have joined Aptana to work on the company’s Jaxer, server-side AJAX development environment.
Wrote Colton:
““We are pleased to announce that Greg Murray (creator of the jMaki AJAX framework, former AJAX architect for Sun Microsystems, Sun NetBeans IDE [integrated development environment] team member and lead on the Java Servlet 2.5 specification) and Ryan Johnson (creator of the livepipe and object.event AJAX libraries) have joined the Aptana Jaxer team!”“
Colton also said that “Greg’s primary role will be creating increasingly robust application frameworks for Jaxer, Aptana’s open-source AJAX server product. Ryan has already been working on MVC [model-view-controller] concepts for Jaxer and will be collaborating with Greg and the rest of the Jaxer team to drive that and other great concepts for Jaxer forward.”
He said the timing was perfect, with the 1.0 release candidate of Jaxer expected in a matter of days.
Colton said that in the next few months, there will be more to come from the Jaxer team. “Greg and Ryan have already been collaborating with the Jaxer team to create an ActiveRecord-like JavaScript ORM [Object Relational Mapping] for Jaxer that promises to make working with JavaScript data a pleasure–since it’ll all be native JavaScript!”
Aptana Jaxer is an open-source Ajax server. Its core engine is the same as the Firefox browser. Jaxer lets Web developers use the same native Web technologies (JavaScript, XML, HTML, DOM, CSS) on both the server and the client, which, compared to alternatives where developers must use different languages on the server and the client, simplifies Web application development, said Kevin Hakman, director of evangelism at Aptana. Jaxer is now available in a pre-1.0 release download here.