Let's play a game:

If you've been to the www.aptana.com homepage recently, you've probably noticed that Aptana Studio is on the verge of its 4 millionth download! It a huge milestone and we're pleased so many people have loved working with Aptana Studio. (And it's just going to get even better with some releases this Summer). But before the download ticker rolls form 3,999,999 to 4,000,000, let's have some fun...

Match your skills to others in the Aptana community to predict when Aptana Studio will get it's 4 millions download ... more precisely... exactly when the download ticker on the Aptana homepage will display 4,000,000? It's likely to happen sometime between June 15th and June 25th. So stake your claim and announce your answer now.

How to publish and lay claim to your answer:

• Use Twitter.com to tweet your answer.
• Use the Pacific Time Zone please. You can specify down to the milliseconds if you like.
• Do not forget the AM or PM! (We'll assume AM if you do.)
• In your tweet you must include @Aptana and #apt4mil to that we can find your prediction on Twitter.

For example:
I predict @Aptana Studio will hit it's 4 millionth download on: June 16, 2009 at 12:00:00 AM (Pacific Time Zone) #apt4mil

Who wins?

This is just for fun to see who gets it right and earns bragging rights for their predictive skills. We'll announce the winner on our blog and Tweet it too and kick in an Aptana t-shirt and a year's license to Aptana Studio Pro as well. The Aptana staff who maintains the ticker will run their own calculation for the 4 millionth download event and who ever is the closest without going over will be the winner. In the event of a tie, the first person who tweeted will be the winner. So announce your prediction soon.

Hint

The download ticker on the Aptana homepage is driven by an algorithm that's kicked off by the startCount() javascript function in the www.aptana.com homepage source (use the view source in your browser to see it). When the page loads it gets the number of actual downloads from the day before and then uses that as the basis for the current day's rate of downloads, assumed to be evenly spread throughout the day. So... we may not really know exactly when the 4 millionth download happens. This is more about calculating when the ticker will roll form 3,999,999 to 4,000,000.

Today at the Nokia Developer Conference in Monaco, Nokia showed off a slick new version of the Nokia WRT and it's tooling: The Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio. The Nokia WRT is the web runtime on Nokia's current generation of phones that lets you use your HTML and JavaScript skills to create instantly installable mobile apps that run on Nokia phones. Like so many mobile runtimes today, Nokia WRT uses WebKit as its core, but it also does more. This latest version packs in a new set of powerful JavaScript APIs that let you incorporate the mobile device's contact list and calendar data, geographical location, SMS messaging, and device sensors, such as an accelerometer, right into your mobile web apps. This is a great step forward enabling millions upon millions of web developers to do the kinds of things that historically only C or Java developers could do.

What's new?

• JavaScript API's for Contacts, Calendar, Location, Landmarks, Sensors (e.g. Accelerometer)
• Homescreen widget development, preview and debugging
• Support for Touch during development and debugging
• Support for both Macintosh and Windows platforms
• New Device Previews during development

The latest Nokia WRT on Nokia N97 platform also lets users personalize their device's homescreen by adding "mini-apps" to them. Imagine being able to track stock positions through Bloomberg, keep up to date on Facebook chatter or tweets on Twitter, or get sports scores and highlights -- all in real-time on the device home screen. With this the device owner can keep current with the information they want and then launch the "parent" applications for more details if desired.

Nokia also has announced it's Ovi Store -- a mobile device accessible service to which software developers can publish their applications and on which mobile devices owners can find, download and purchase mobile apps for Nokia devices.

Download and Resources

You can download the beta versions of the latest Nokia WRT and Nokia WRT Plugin by following these instructions at Forum Nokia. You'll also find a Quick Start Guide and Release Notes there as well. (If you want the non-beta 1.0 release without this latest set of features, install Aptana Studio, then install the Nokia WRT Plugin form the My Aptana > Plugins area.

Aptana RadRails 1.2 is now available. In addition to making it even easier to get your Rails environment set up and configured, for new and expert users alike this release makes deploying and updating your Rails apps to scalable servers via Aptana Cloud Connect as easy as a few clicks. Watch this 4 minute screencast.

What's new in Aptana RadRails 1.2?

Easier to get Rails set up and configured (especially on Windows).
Since setting up Rails can be confusing to new users (and time consuming even for the most experienced), we’ve added a wizard that helps you get standard Ruby installed as well as RubyGems. For Windows users, the wizard will even get and run the Standard Ruby One-Click installer for Windows for you.

Streamlined Rails app deployment and updates via Aptana Cloud Connect.
Pick a Rails project, then choose Deploy to a New Site, Deploy to Staging, or Deploy to Public. Then RadRails and Aptana Cloud Connect do the rest for you. RadRails 1.2 automates setting up all the integration points, installs the necessary gems, and executes the proper deployment commands for you. And as always shows you in the console all the commands so that you can do them manually or use them in your scripts. Checkout the screencast to see for yourself:

Preparing for Eclipse 3.4 compatibility.
The release also lays some plumbing that will be useful as we move towards using Eclipse 3.4 as the platform for future releases. This primarily means that some debugging functionality that only worked in Studio 1.2 (based on Eclipse 3.2) will now work in Eclipse 3.3+ and in the next major release of Studio when that comes out.

And more...
To view the full changelog for the release, go to http://support.aptana.com/asap/browse/ROR/fixforversion/10082. Note that this is for 1.2.0. In fact, we just pushed a 1.2.1 bugfix release which fixed one major and two minor bugs introduced in 1.2.0.

Enjoy!

-- Chris

As of today, March 24, 2009, anyone using Aptana Studio as a plugin to Eclipse can deploy Java apps to the Cloud via Aptana Cloud Connect. Aptana Cloud Connect integrates Aptana Studio/Eclipse with your cloud hosted Java apps. It lets you instantly put Java projects and apps into to the Cloud, then manage those apps though development, staging/testing and production cycles. Right now, you can also try the Java service for free.

Java developers and teams can easily get started with new new projects without the headaches of setting up hardware, installing software, or configuring networks (or waiting in line for the IT department to get around to your request). As this short screencast shows, you just click the "Deploy to Cloud..." button and in about 2 minutes you've got resources provisioned, complete with Tomcat, mySQL, source control and more all ready to use and integrated right into the IDE. This makes Aptana Cloud Connect ideal for web projects that use Servlets, JSP, JSF, Spring, or other Java web technologies that can be packaged as .war files. And once an app is deployed, allocating more RAM or storage to scale the app is as easy as dragging and dropping a slider. For apps architected to run across multiple machines, private IP addresses in the data center provide for speedy network connections.

The combination of Aptana Studio's popular HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Ajax development capabilities, Eclipse for JavaEE development, and Aptana Cloud Connect for integration with application hosting and life-cycle management services accelerates time to use for new application, reduces costs, and makes the development process much more efficient. Since we released Aptana Studio several years ago we've seen more and more Eclipse users adding Aptana as a plugin to their IDE and using Aptana Studio's HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax capabilities in concert with their Java projects. Now those same Java web projects can go right into a cloud data center and be managed through the development, staging/testing and production life-cycle via Aptana Cloud Connect.

In addition to Java, Aptana Cloud Connect provides application hosting and life-cycle integration for Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Jaxer (the open source Ajax and JavaScript server based on the Mozilla Firefox browser engine).

How to get started?

There's a free trial so that you can check it out at no cost. All you need is Aptana Studio 1.2.5 (free, open source software) or later plugged into Eclipse.

Highlights

Here's a few of the key features of Aptana Studio and Aptana Cloud Connect for Java Developers

• Instantly provision servers running Tomcat and MySQL
• Work with their remote environments directly from their Aptana Studio perspective in Eclipse
• Get full root access, SSH and SFTP
• Collaborate with other team members on projects
• Tap into integrated Subversion or Git source control
• Migrate projects from development, to staging to production contexts
• Scale computational and storage resources up and down at will

What does it cost?

Pricing starts at $20 per month -- which includes all your hosting fees and bandwidth (unless you exceed 10 terabytes -- yeah...that's terabytes!). You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time. Fees are prorated to the hour so that you only pay for what you use. Aptana Studio is free, open source software.

Bob Buffone has released the latest version of jsLex 1.1.1, a tool that captures a complete view of the performance of an Ajax application in a similar way to using jProfile for Java code. What's new? Well for one thing, it's now packaged as a plug-in for Aptana Studio and Eclipse! Learn more at rockstarapps.com.

Where can you meet up with members of the Aptana team this month? Adobe MAX, Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar, LAMP Meetup, JavaScript Meetup.

Next Month...

I am excited to announce that the 1.0 version of Jaxer, the free, open source Ajax server, has been released. If you like working with JavaScript and Ajax, you're going to love Jaxer! This 1.0 release of Jaxer is the culmination of three years of work to deliver this first-of-a-kind Ajax server that embeds the Mozilla Firefox browser engine within a server and full JavaScript application framework so that you can use your JavaScript and Ajax skills not just to create web pages but also to create full web applications on the server as well.

If you can't wait, download it now or learn more.

While Jaxer is the brainchild of members of the Aptana team who have been advancing it since Aptana was founded, kudos must also go to the developer community who has actively participated in Jaxer betas since early 2008 and provided much feedback that's guided Jaxer development. Thus in many ways Jaxer is an Ajax server built by web developers for web developers. Jaxer was also created with guidance from members of our technical advisory board including Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Mozilla CTO, who helped us with insights to tune things and deliver initial performance benchmarks for Jaxer in the range of PHP and Ruby on Rails.

If you've already been using Jaxer you're likely familiar with its database, file system and socket APIs and its ability to not only run JavaScript and process the HTML DOM at the server, but also to expose server-side functions to the Web such that a HTML page can call back to those functions directly from the Web page. Thus Ajax communications could not be any easier with Jaxer: You just write a server-side function, "proxy it" with one line of code, then call it from the Web browser as if that function were part of the web page. Jaxer handles the client/server communications, data transformations, and provides the client-side function with its return value (either synchronously or asynchronously).

Recently we've added even more capabilities based on community feedback. These including support for RESTful APIs as well as native support for JSON to supplement the E4X (XML for JavaScript) support that's been there all along (thank you Mozilla!). The combination of these means you can easily create RESTful services that can be consumed by a wide array of Ajax applications, Web gadgets, Facebook or OpenSocial apps, and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight based apps since those support JavaScript too. Plus mobile devices like the Apple iPhone and phones from other manufacturers are nearly all supporting JavaScript and Ajax. As you can imagine we're excited to see JavaScript become more and more the lingua franca of Web applications. It's already ubiquitous on the client side and now you can use it confidently on the server side.

This introduction to Jaxer screencast shows you the Jaxer basics with some examples of using Jaxer's
<script runat="server | both | server-proxy" > settings.

Here are more examples of Jaxer in action:

• Integrating with a database and calling server-side JS functions from the browser
• Using Jaxer to securely communicate across domains and mashup information
• Creating RESTful data services with Jaxer
• Using Ajax libraries server-side to mutate HTML pages before they are served
• Using Jaxer to interact with the server operating system
• Easy file uploading
• Creating Server-Side images with Jaxer

Jaxer 1.0 is dual licensed. It's available to all for free under an open source license or in its Jaxer Pro edition under a commercial license and support agreement from Aptana. Jaxer is available to try in various ways: It is included in Aptana Studio 1.2, can be downloaded standalone, and can be tried for free via Aptana Cloud, our elastically scalable hosting and application lifecycle management service. See http://www.aptana.com/cloud for details.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library, better known as YUI, version 2.6.0 was released earlier this month, and is now supported by Aptana Studio. YUI 2.6.0 includes numerous fixes, enhancements, and optimizations; introduces a new Carousel Control; breaks the Paginator Control out from DataTable; and makes final eight components that were previously designated beta.

In addition, YUI 2.6.0 also includes a huge number of functional examples—all of which are available, along with code assist, code completion, built-in API documentation, and more, when you install the YUI 2.6.0 plugin for Aptana Studio.

To get the YUI 2.6.0 plugin for Aptana Studio:

1. First, if you do not have it already, get Aptana Studio. It's free, open source software.
2. In Aptana Studio, open the Plugins Manager by choosing Window > Show View > Other... > Aptana Standard Views > Plugins Manager.
   
3. In the Plugins Manager, select Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) 2.6.0 and click the green + icon ( ) to install.
   
4. In the Updates dialog box, expand the tree until you see the available "Aptana Support for YUI" plugins. Select Aptana Support for YUI 2.6.0.00002 and click Next.
   
5. In the Install dialog box, accept the terms of the license agreement and then click Next.
6. In the Verification dialog box, click Install.
7. In the next Install dialog box, click Finish.
8. Aptana Studio will begin downloading the YUI 2.6.0 plugin. Click Yes when you're prompted to restart.

To get started using YUI 2.6.0 in Aptana Studio, do one of the following:

• Click the New Project button ( ) on the toolbar.
  1. Choose Default Web Project in the dialog that appears and click Next.
     
  2. Give your project a name and click Next.
  3. Check the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) 2.6 box and continue clicking Next until you see a Finish button.
• Expand the YUI 2.6 Samples node in the Samples view, right-click on one of the folders, and choose Import sample as project.
  All of the samples for that category, as well as the library and asset files they depend on, will appear in your project. For example, if you right-click on carousel, you'll get a sample file that shows how to use a selection spotlight with the Carousel control, one that shows how to use a circular Carousel control, one that demonstrates partially revealing previous and next items in a Carousel, and so on.

I'm pleased to announce the release of a major new online service: Aptana Cloud.

Aptana Cloud is the ultimate in ease and efficiency — a suite of online services integrated right into Aptana Studio 1.2 that puts the power of cloud computing to work for you. Cloud's integrated production, staging, source control, application monitoring, threshold and key event notifications systems, stats, logs, server tail views, team management, and tons of other features, streamlines your deployment and development processes and costs far less than doing it yourself.

Users who experienced Aptana Cloud through this summer's early access program have remarked as to how incredibly easy Aptana has made deploying, scaling, developing, and collaborating on hosted sites and applications. It's radically more efficient than anything you've seen or used before (and you can still use SSH and SFTP too). Aptana Cloud currently supports both Jaxer deployments as well as PHP deployments. The short screencast below gives you a good sense of the ease, and you can learn more at http://www.aptana.com/cloud.

Aptana Studio 1.2 also includes new capabilities beyond Aptana Cloud including faster performance, database explorer, bug fixes and UI enhancements all around.

Watch Cloud Screencast

Watch Studio Screencast

Aptana Jaxer, the open-source Ajax server that embeds the Mozilla browser engine server-side, is nearing its first release. There's been lots of work on Jaxer with significant community feedback and ideas coming from the Jaxer betas over the summer. This latest (and probably last before 1.0) release candidate packs in some great performance enhancements like native JSON as well as a brand new built-in capability for easily dispatching RESTful and RPC service requests. And like before we're looking for feedback before we finalize and ship 1.0. So please grab a copy of the latest...

If you've not yet tried Jaxer, now is a great time. Aptana Studio provides extensive integrated tooling and samples for Jaxer, and Aptana Cloud now lets you deploy instantly to Jaxer servers running on elastic cloud computing infrastructure. Of course you can also download Jaxer and put it on your server for free too. It's free and open source.

If you are already using Jaxer, you'll love all the enhancements.

Here a synopsis of all the new features and improvements that have gone into this latest release candidate:

• Jaxer.Sandbox: HTTP-level control; support readyState, toHTML, waitForCompletion
• Built-in, extensible dispatching for RESTful and RPC service requests
• Fast, native JSON support
• Improved APIs for HTTP Request and Response
• More flexible handling of application configuration
• Many bug fixes, smaller improvements, and cleanups

More specifics on these below...

Sandbox enhancements

• return headers and other properties about the request and the response
• new method: waitForCompletion(maxMillis)
• new method: toHTML
• query the readyState

Better HTTP request handling

• More control over how to receive the body, useful for binary data or long posts
• Automatic handling of the body based on Content-Type
• Implement RFC-compliant parsing of the URL
• Offer SSL certificate error handling on requests

Better app management

• Automatically load configApps-like files
• Cleaned up the default local version of configApps.js

Support for web services

• Added default sample-level dispatchers for web service requests and RPC requests
• Allow specifying a handler explicitly for your app
• Support for RESTful calls (including GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD)
• Default Apache and Studio configs route URLs containing jaxer-service and jaxer-rpc to Jaxer

JSON improvements

• Use native JSON when available
• Use "standard" JSON serialization by default
• More explicit error message when cycles encountered

DB improvements

• MySQL: Allow specifying a socket when defining connection parameters
• MySQL: Correct handling of booleans
• Resultset: cleaned up the data structure to make it more efficient and easily serializable

Better HTTP Response handling

• Allow setContents to take a DOM node, a document, or an object, and "do the right thing"

Misc improvements

• Much faster start/stop/restart and more robust Jaxer process management

Dojo 1.2 was just released over at www.dojotoolkit.org, and it's also available in Aptana Studio! The Dojo 1.2 plugin for Aptana Studio provides code completion; code assist for Dojo Core, Dijit, and DojoX; sample code; project wizards; and more to support your Dojo development efforts.

The Dojo team is calling this their "sliced bread" release because each change or enhancement felt like the best thing since sliced bread. See for yourself what they've been up to in the release notes, and then get started using Dojo 1.2 in Studio!

To get the Dojo 1.2 plugin for Aptana Studio:

1. In Aptana Studio, open the Plugins Manager by choosing Window > Show View > Other... > Aptana Standard Views > Plugins Manager.
2. In the Plugins Manager, select Dojo version 1.2.0 and click the green +icon to install.
   
3. In the Updates dialog box, expand the tree until you see the five Dojo plugins. Select Aptana Support for Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0.00001 and click Next.
   
4. In the Install dialog box, accept the terms of the license agreement and then click Next.
5. In the Verification dialog box, click Install. (The provider of this feature is Aptana.)
6. In the next Install dialog box, click Finish.
7. Aptana Studio will begin downloading the Dojo 1.2 plugin. Click Yes when you're prompted to restart, and the features of the new plugin will be available in Studio.

As of today you can download or update to the latest release candidates of Aptana Studio, Jaxer and Cloud. These are major releases for our company: we're updating Studio to a new version, we're releasing an incredible new service, Aptana Cloud, and we've reached our 1.0 milestone of one of the world's most unique offerings, the first Ajax Server, Aptana Jaxer.

Cloud 1.0 RC makes web app deployment and management almost too easy!

Aptana Cloud is a new service from Aptana that is completely integrated into Aptana Studio enabling you to more easily develop, deploy, and manage your web applications. With PHP, Apache, MySQL and Jaxer servers already running on top of an elastic computing infrastructure, Aptana Cloud is the fastest way to deploy and scale your sites and apps. Even before you go live, Cloud's hosted SVN, SFTP and staging servers combined with the remote file editing, database management, and Cloud configuration tools make site development and management a breeze.

You can see all the features or watch this screencast to check out just how seamless Aptana has made deploying and scaling your apps in the "Cloud".

We wanted to push out a RC (Release Candidate) version prior to final release so that you could give it a try. It's absolutely free right now, so we'd love for you to try it out. Let us know what you think. Let us know if we missed anything or if you'd like to see something done differently. You can get started by downloading Aptana Studio 1.2 RC (which comes bundled with Jaxer 1.0 RC as well as our Cloud RC support), or if you are an existing Studio user, follow these update instructions.

Studio 1.2 RC adds new capabilities and improves upon many core features.

Enhancements include: Updated smart synchronization utility and a brand new set of visual database tools plus numerous bug fixes and UI enhancements with performance improvements throughout. A new Aptana ID system provides single-sign for the bug database (ASAP), Aptana Cloud, and soon the discussion forums and more. And there's a new 'My Aptana' start page with quick links to your recent files and core features.

Jaxer 1.0 RC adds and refines more features for server-side JavaScript and Ajax.

Since Jaxer is the world's first Ajax server, this release candidate is a huge milestone. This next-to-final release of Jaxer has some great performance improvements that make it comparable to Ruby on Rails and PHP, plus includes new APIs for JSON and REST style data services.
If you are not yet familiar, Jaxer lets you use your JavaScript and Ajax skills server-side to create entire apps, or optimized presentation tiers that can complement other back-ends. Aptana Studio 1.2 RC includes the Jaxer 1.0 RC.

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, in this article by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, discusses how Mozilla is "'getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier' with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases."

The Mozilla JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) is what's inside the Firefox browser and the Aptana Jaxer, Ajax server.

"Eich says that Mozilla wants to 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language' and show them that 'it really is a platform for writing full applications.'"

Read the full article >

Mark Perkins, a Senior Web Developer at VGroup has summarized in this blog post the ubuiquity of JavaScript on the Web and how this dynamic language is empowering all kinds of new possibilities in applications. From ECMAScript to ActionScript, Flash to W3C, Google and Yahoo Maps, Apple's Mobile Me, Aptana Jaxer, Rhino, Firefox, Apple Gadgets, Google Gadgets, Yahoo Gadgets, and even Vista Gadgets, and Adobe AIR, (and more), Mark highlights how JavaScript is at the core of the future of the Web not just online, but on the desktop and on mobile devices as well.

Only thing I'd add to Mark's comments is that JavaScript is set to get even faster than the already blazing improvements delivered by Mozilla Firefox and the Webkit engine that powers iPhones and Sarafi. Projects like Tamarin and its convergence with Mozilla's SpiderMonkey (which Aptana Jaxer, the open source Ajax server uses) are slated to provide the equivalent of Just-In-Time (JIT) compliation of JavaScript and open even greater possibilities for greater JavaScript use.

There are some interesting threads going on in the Aptana Forums about using Aptana Studio with Adobe Flex and Flex Builder. The idea of using Ajax and Flex or Flash together is not new. Google Finance did a great job a few years ago blending the two to provide a very nice user experience with Flash-based interactive charts within an otherwise Ajax UI.

It seems that the Aptana community is uncovering increasing efficiencies in using Aptana Studio and Adobe's Flex Builder together. We've also known that many Adobe AIR users are building their Ajax apps for AIR using Aptana Studio, and have heard from others that using Aptana Jaxer to create JSON data services (written natively in JavaScript) consumable by Flash and Flex apps makes a lot of sense as well. Flash and Flex each have an "Ajax bridge" to expose JavaScript APIs for the embedded objects.

Anyways... It seems Adobe is now actively taking a deeper look at this trend in the hybridization of Ajax and Flash and Flex. I saw that they are offering $75 bucks for an hour phone call to discuss your experience with and thoughts on using these together.

Here's the link if you're interested: http://www.adobe.com/go/RIAintegration_study/. $75 bucks... That's almost the cost of a tank of gas in San Francisco.

Rich Waters of Ext JS has put up a great example of using Ext JS server-side with Aptana Jaxer. Check out the example and from there get the full source code to give it a go yourself.

"We can see that Jaxer lets developers leverage the hard work which has already been spent building client-side libraries on the server-side. These simple examples show off some of the true potential of utilizing the Ext JS framework on the server-side" says Rich.

The easy to follow example shows off a very simple wrapper around an Ext.data.Store and the corresponding Jaxer server code that returns JSON to a Ext JS datagrid.

A new Aptana RadRails book has been released. Aptana community member Javier Ramirez's "Aptana RadRails: An IDE For Rails Development" (Packt Publishing, May 2008) is now available. Find it at Amazon, or direct from Packt (where its a tad cheaper it seems), or at other fine book establishments around the world!

Here's the summary:

A comprehensive guide to using RadRails to develop your Ruby on Rails projects in a professional and productive manner

• Comprehensive guide to using RadRails during the whole development cycle
• Code Assistance, Graphical Debugger, Testing, Integrated Console
• Manage your gems, plug-ins, servers, generators, and Rake tasks
• Rails 2.0-ready
• Includes a chapter about Subversion and Database integration
• Smart Code Assistants for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

Aptana RadRails is an Integrated Development Environment for Ruby on Rails projects. Built on top of the well-known Eclipse platform, RadRails provides all the tools you need to create a whole Rails application from a single interface, allowing you to focus on the creative part of the development as your IDE takes care of the mechanics.

What you will learn from this book

This book will show you how to use the tools RadRails provides to improve your productivity:

• Tools for writing code: Specialized Editors for Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; >> Code Assistance; Code Completion; Refactoring; Quick Code Navigation; Outline Views
• Tools for testing and debugging: Unit Testing; Graphical Debugger; Monitoring of Log Files
• Tools for project management: Specialized views for launching your Tasks and Generators; Management of your Gems and Plug-ins; Rails Servers Control
• You will also learn how to use other Eclipse plug-ins for synchronizing your projects with Subversion and for managing your databases.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Ruby on Rails developers who want to make the most of the framework by using an Integrated Development Environment.

Even though the book explains everything you need to follow the contents, the focus is on how to use the tool and not on the Rails framework itself, so previous working knowledge of Rails is highly advisable. Previous knowledge of Eclipse is not necessary.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author: Javier Ramírez

Javier Ramírez has been developing Web Applications since before the term Web Application was coined. Born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1974, he started programming as a hobby around the age of 11 assisted by his older sister. A few years later, he got his first modem and became a regular of BBSes and Newsgroups. His interest in developing server applications that can be accessed remotely comes from those times.

He has learned —and forgotten— many programming languages, including Basic, dBase III, Cobol, Pascal, SQL, C, C++, ASP, TCL, JavaScript, PHP, and Java, the language on which he has focused for most of his career so far. He has held the positions of programmer, analyst, consultant, team leader, post-sales engineer, project manager, and software architect, totaling over 12 years in the IT business.

Having developed projects mainly for banks and other big corporations in Spain, Italy and the US, he co-founded some years ago a small software development shop, which provided him with valuable experience about the difficulties and the joys of entrepreneurship. After two years, he left the company in pursuit of new professional challenges.

For the last two years, he has been proudly working for ASPgems, where he discovered Ruby on Rails, which soon became his framework of choice for developing Web Applications. He is one of the organizers of the Spanish Rails Conference, also participating as a Speaker in the two events held so far.

He has also been an instructor on Robotics, Java, FatWire Content Server, and Ruby on Rails, and a University Lecturer in the subjects of 'Software Engineering' and 'The Java Programming Language', which he currently teaches at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, in Madrid.

Javier Ramírez holds a B.Sc. in Business Information Systems with First Class Honors and a degree in Ingeniería en Sistemas de Computación.

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Javier's other postings in the Aptana forums

Aptana will build off of its IDE and AJAX success with its new technology. Read the full story.
Learn more about Aptana Cloud, an "Elastic Application Cloud" that's ideal for Web developers who use scripting languages.
Join the early access program.

Tony Issakov has written up a nice conceptual article on how Aptana Jaxer can simplify certain tasks of dojo and dijit development. He starts with a simple case of how Jaxer can enable simplified server-side dijit markup, then expands the ideas to JSF, JSTL, and templates. Tony explains: "Once upon a time dojo had markup ability using custom tags. This was pulled because as it turns out, some browsers just scrap tags they don't understand. One browser that did support tags of a non HTML nature though was Mozilla and in turn we get this freedom back via Jaxer." For example: <div dojoType="dijit.form.button" label="test"></div> can become... <dijit type="button" label="test2"></dijit>

Here's some picks from the blogoshpere, We have a real nice write up on using MySQL with Jaxer from the viewpoint of a php developer, penned by our own inimitable Ian Selby. JavaScript & MySQL, A nice insight into accessing the wonderful world of Java from Jaxer by Joe Walker Jaxer to Java, and some coverage of our recent RadRails 1.0 release.

Lee Provoost at Capgemini just learned about Jaxer, and he's challenging us to set up a Jaxer Pet Shop. OK, that's the kind of challenge we love, so of course we'll take him up on it. Especially because we don't want his heart to stop beating for too long:

"Yesterday, I bought a new Apple computer and I was happily installing and configuring my Eclipse environment and of course the must-have for every web-developer: Aptana! One of the big problems with JavaScript and Ajax programming is that there are barely good development environments. Syntax highlighting can be handled by most IDEs, but when it comes to complex code completion and assistance, nothing can beat Aptana as far as I know. You can either install it standalone or as an Eclipse plugin. So I surfed to the website of Aptana to get my plugin, but suddenly I stumbled on Aptana Jaxer. What caught my I was the following sentence: “Jaxer, The world’s first Ajax server”. My heart stopped beating, my whole (young) life passed by and I was thinking: "gosh, I thought I’ve seen it all…""

In fact we're thinking of building two pet shops (neither of which will ever sell any real pets unless they're of the Tamagotchi variety, btw):

1. One that's end-to-end Ajax, showing how much simpler it is to develop Ajax apps when you can stay in one paradigm, and giving some ideas of how to architect full-fledged Jaxer apps;
2. And one that's built on top of a Java Pet Shop, perhaps leveraging the DWR integration to Java we're now working on, to show how you can easily have the best of both worlds: the strength of an enterprise Java app with the engaging user interaction afforded by Ajax. We'll see how you end up with increased security and a clean division of labor between business logic in Java and the user-oriented application flow in Ajax (on both client and server).

Actually, we'll probably just build the first iterations of these, and then solicit the community's help to define better application infrastructure for Jaxer. People are already working on some ORMs for Jaxer, so I'm sure there will be some exciting conversations.

Dion Almaer blogs about the latest update to his gears integration with Jaxer

Here are some blog entries posted from some of the early adopters of Jaxer.
Kritikal on Linux
Peter Svensson

When Google Gears first came out, people were excited to see simple, powerful DB access in the browser. Now with Jaxer offering Ajax on the server, there's some very interesting client-server straddling to be done...

Dion Almaer already straddles Google, where he works, and Ajaxian, where he blogs. And as an early adopter (think first few hours) of Jaxer, he's already brewed cool examples of server-side Ajax. Since he's been talking to the Gears team internally to Google, he's now put together an example of using the same DB API on the browser and the server.

Yesterday we released version 0.9.2 of Jaxer, and in it you'll find that our Jaxer.DB.ResultSet now supports the Google Gears resultset API natively, in addition to its more JavaScript-y API. You can read more about these in the Jaxer DB documentation page. So Dion's example can probably be simplified a bunch now.

But what will be even more interesting is tying together client-side persistence with server-side persistence. Imagine e.g. that going off-line grabs your data from the shared database on the server, you get local persistence as needed, then going on-line syncs your data back to the shared database. The same code works on both, and could detect whether you're offline or online and just "do the right thing." No doubt this is just the beginning...

Mark McLaren, has blogged about EXSLT in FF3 and Jaxer, he's even written some Jaxer samples.

A how to guide on integrating Jaxer with Apache Tomcat has been released.

This guide walks you through how to enable Jaxer to post-process your HTML and JSP pages for your Tomcat web applications. The tutorial includes two WAR files, one that adds support for Jaxer callbacks on your Tomcat pages and the other includes samples on possible ways to integrate Jaxer with your JSP/HTML pages.

Jaxer also has a connector available for the Jetty HTTP server which is used inside Aptana Studio.

Please use this forum thread to discuss the Jaxer-Tomcat connect

Jaxer lets you use your full stack of Ajax technologies — HTML, JavaScript, DOM manipulation, XHR, etc. — on the server, to make web application development a lot smoother and more natural.

But Jaxer is also based on the Mozilla engine, in fact on the same core that will power Firefox 3, just without the rendering. And this simple fact unlocks a lot of power that's been built up over many years by Mozilla developers. Unless your apps and sites have targeted Firefox exclusively — unlikely, given its market share — they could not rely on JavaScript features beyond version 1.4. And how about the numerous extensions that have been developed for Firefox, some of which actually ship with the browser? Most developers don't even know about them, and they couldn't rely on them being available to most of their target audience.

But now all that Firefox 3 goodness is under the hood of your Jaxer, on the server side, under your full control. So if JavaScript 1.7 and 1.8 generators, iterators, and array comprehensions float your boat, then happy sailing. Soon native JSON parsing and encoding will be available, along with other features on the march towards JavaScript 2. Perhaps more significantly, you have a rich SOA stack: SOAP, WSDL, and other four-letter friends from the enterprise architect's bestiary. Microformats, anyone? Simply use the script loader to import the built-in Microformats.js and you have access to hCard, hCalendar, and other functionalities. XSLT transformations are at your fingertips by just "new"ing up an XSLTProcessor object. There are all sorts of hidden gems to discover: did you know there's a very nice RDF subsystem in there? How about base64 encoding and decoding? Try typing for (var p in Components.classes) { print(p); } in the Jaxer Shell to see that we've just scratched the surface of what's available.

Of course, if you don't see something you need, you can always just build it: think server-side GreaseMonkey scripts on steroids. I can't wait to see what people will come up with, now that all these capabilities are free from their browser dependence. There's already been a number of cool examples on various blogs, and we'll start to roll out more on a regular basis. More importantly, we'll make it easy to share your own samples and snippets with the community. Stay tuned...

Wow, it’s been a long road getting to this release date, but I am very excited and proud of our team, and I'm happy to say that today we released our beta 1 of Jaxer -- what we believe to be the first true Ajax Server product.

So what is an “Ajax Server”? Simply put, we unify the development model for Ajax developers. That is, write “Ajax” code client AND server. The same APIs, the same JavaScript, the same HTML and best of all, manipulate the DOM on the server.

What does all that mean? It means that you can do a getElementById() and set its innerHTML on the server side just as easily as you can on the browser. You can write a single JavaScript function and share it between browser and server. You can write server functions which can be transparently called from the browser -- synchronous or asynchronously.

If you’re a beginning Ajax developer and any of that sounds complicated, it’s not. It simply means you can now build an entire Web 2.0 application, client and server, using only the Ajax technologies you love.

I asked several of the leaders in the Ajax space to join with us and with you, the Ajax community, in defining where we go from here. I’m very honored to say that we’ve got an all-star group assembled as our Aptana Advisory Board, just take a look at this who’s who list.

We’ve placed a few screencasts online so you can take a quick look at what Jaxer is all about and how you can start playing with it right away.

Send us your feedback, your suggestions, and tell us what you are building. After all, building a free, open-source product ultimately means we’re building this for you!

Regards,
Paul Colton