Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Aptana releases Ruby on Rails tool

news
Mar 12, 20082 mins

Company also working on AJAX server

Aptana is announcing the availability Wednesday of RadRails 1.0 for Aptana Studio, providing an Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails.

A development plug-in for Aptana Studio, RadRails 1.0 features IDE capabilities of Aptana and Eclipse as well as access to the Rails shell console for Rails developers. Beginners can use IDE features and configuration wizards to get started quickly while advanced users can access the shell command line interface and Aptana HMTL, CSS and JavaScript authoring. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) library support also offers productivity gains, Aptana said.

Aptana became home of the RadRails community project last year.

Also featured in version 1.0 are automatic indexing of code assets and in-line access to commands and arguments within the Ruby shell. The release has the JRuby interpreter to deliver instant previews within the IDE and integrate with Java as well.

Aptana also is touting Jaxer, an AJAX server offering access to databases, files and networking as well as logging, process management, security and integration.

“Jaxer is a new kind of Web server. It is a Web server optimized for Web pages and applications that use AJAX,” said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing at Aptana, in an e-mail.

The product overcomes the obstacle in which Web sites and applications use HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the browser but the server lacked capabilities to deal with these technologies. 

HTML, JavaScript and CSS are native to Jaxer along with XMLHttprequests, JSON and DOM scripting. JavaScript can run on the server using the same techniques mastered on the browser, according to Aptana.

“Jaxer provides a unified development model for Web page and application developers since they can write both server-side and client-side JavaScript in the same HTML file,” Hakman said. “The Jaxer server executes the server-side scripts on the server and sends the results and the client-side scripts and HTML and CSS to the client for interpretation on the client.”

The Jaxer server, currently in a beta release, comes installed with Aptana Studio.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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