Pros And Cons With Jaxer

I realize that this question has been asked before, but it has been a month with no decent responses... I'm looking at Aptana's Jaxer and I find the concept to be very exciting. H

Solution 1:

I didn't use Jaxer for very long, but here's some things I found:

Pros

• Write the frontend and backend in the same code. Especially nice for writing validation logic.
• "Seamless" AJAX communication back to the server - it's just like calling a JS function.
• The ability to use JavaScript frameworks like jQuery to manipulate the DOM.
• The ability to generate or manipulate images using the Canvas API.
• You get to write your server JavaScript using whizzy new JavaScript 1.8 features like Array extras and getters/setters.

Cons

• I found their API to be unstable (they were transitioning to 1.0 when I was trying it so that kinda made sense) and the documentation was confusing, missing, or didn't match with changed functionality. I also found that it was very hard to debug my Jaxer server-side code, and when I got in trouble the error messages weren't very helpful.
• You don't get real MVC or even MVP (ASP.NET-style) separation between your presentation and your logic.
• I personally couldn't get E4X (xml in JavaScript) working, which was supposed to be a big draw.
• There's not a lot of framework built around it for building a whole application. You're starting from some pretty basic building blocks.
• It's not really providing any help in your view, so forget all the templating or reusable components you might use elsewhere. Not that you can't replicate that, but it's more difficult than having it out of the box.

Overall, I think Jaxer has the most promise as a postprocessor in front of another web framewok. It would be great to use Jaxer to layer all the spiffy AJAX stuff on top of an existing site. It would make it a lot easier to make a dynamic site with validation / page manipulation logic shared between server and client. I don't think I would want to write an application using only Jaxer. Also, it's young (and immature) - I'll be interested to see where it ends up.

Solution 2:

I did come across this set of performance benchmarks.

It looks as though Jaxer performs better than Rails, but not as well as php...