Using Dojo’s Django Template language on Jaxer

Aptana’s Jaxer is a server side JavaScript (SSJS) server. With some modifications to a web page, the Dojo Toolkit 1.1 will be able to run on the server. With the Dojo Toolkit running on the server, you can utilize the Dojo Toolkit’s Django Template library (DTL) rendering engine to do templating within Jaxer. The current build of the Dojo Toolkit does not yet include support for Jaxer, but support is currently being added and future builds should include patches to properly work with Jaxer. Once Jaxer support has been added to the Dojo Toolkit, the following modifications will be needed for your page to run on the Jaxer server:

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From a recent interview with Kevin Hakman on Ajaxian:

“I personally love the ability to write a script that runs on the server, but call it from the client as if it were running on the client. In this case Jaxer handles all the sync or async communications for you transparently, and soon will provide end-to-end debug capabilities as well. We’re also now working with Joe Walker of the DWR project to extend this kind of capability to remote Java objects as well through Jaxer.”

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While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch.

What is AIR?

It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

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I’m often asked how to keep communications clean between components when you’re dealing with widgets and objects coming from dynamic creation, markup creation, and widgets within widgets (within widgets!). Dojo provides several powerful techniques designed to make an application run faster, make it easier to maintain, and help the code look cleaner. We’ll explore some traditional component communication techniques, and how we might improve upon them using the Dojo Toolkit.
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I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations. I came back wishing that I wasn’t on such a tight schedule so that I could have attended more talks.

Kirk Pepperdine was there, and despite not hearing his talk we had quite a bit of debate about it (we met due to a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel by the conference center). Maybe his talk turned out differently, but it sounded as though he was going to be ringing the warning bell for big databases. The argument essentially went: transactions don’t scale over multiple CPUs (something Amazon etc. have already discovered) and since we’re all going multi-core, we need to look to ways of doing things that are not transactional. Kirk’s answer was object databases.

I did a tutorial on DWR, and updated the ‘Case for the Open Web’ talk that I did with Alex at TAE. I managed to add 50% more material and finished early to boot. I guess with 2 people talking there’s a lot more banter.

One of my contentions was that monopolies are bad for the web, no matter who holds them.

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