David Greenspan, JD Zamfirescu, and Aaron Iba have released AppJet . Like OpenMocha , it's a web-based soft-coding framework that streamlines the easy development and deployment of small web apps using server-side javascript and like OpenMocha, it's powered by Helma.
Unlike OpenMocha, they went the extra miles of making the framework very approachable by well integrating AppJet online hosting of your custom apps, by designing the framework in a way that I think developers used to PHP like environments will appreciate and by gearing it towards very simple, small apps at the beginning.
The key that enables a hosted app service like this to deploy many small apps from many users without fuss is to properly seal the server-side javascript environments of the different apps from each other. Security is the main factor there of course, but efficiency is the other. I've been experimenting with this a bit for a future update to OpenMocha and learned that it is trickier than I would like it to be.
No surprise then that this is exactly the area of their code that they consider to be their crown jules and that they won't be able to open source. They do intend to open-source the Javascript framework that runs within (and around, presumably) that virtualization. Actually, the source of the framework that runs within the virtualization is already visible online .
I particularly like the way they encourage appjet apps to be an open collection, in a sense becoming an appjet code library. That's an aspect that already was very successful in the old days of WebCrossing and that I think is an essential part of a web-soft-coding environment.
Indeed, facilitating easy code reuse and sharing is a focal point that would benefit the Helma community at large as well. I need to setup something like a code bin, where we can easily upload, categorize, search and find code snippets for reuse in other Helma apps.
14.12.2007, 12:01