What's the deal with Jaxer? [closed]

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Remember Aptana Jaxer? It plugs into Apache and allows using JavaScript on the server-side as an alternative to languages such as PHP. It comes with a consistens and slick API for filesystem access, database connectivity, socket communication and whatever else you need.

I wonder why hasn't this been more widely adopted, why aren't more people using this? Javascript is a modern and clean programming language as opposed to PHP and the Jaxer API is just so much more consistent and neat. No offense, but the PHP API is just such a big mess with all its i开发者_如何学运维nconsistencies and its inconsequent function naming convention.

Jaxer also makes client/server communication really convenient with its runat="server-proxy" where you can directly call server-side function from within your client-side script and Jaxer takes care of all the XML HTTP request stuff.

So I would just really like to here what people think about it or why there's hardly anyone using it. Not wanting to start a flamewar here, I'm just curious.

Thanks

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Well, first of all, there is Node.JS out there, too. Far more people have heard of that, probably. And people do use node, especially when it comes to chats and similar things: Things there long-polling is appreciated.

My personal problem with node is, that it is so asynchronous. That's a very, very, very big pro on one hand, because is allows most awesome performance and makes some things so much easier, but on the other hand it is a big minus for those used to synchronous programming languages. I simply have problems with looking at code which has 15 callbacks nested in each other...

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I remember taking a look at Jaxer, back when it came out. I don't remember any sample applications at the time though. I wanted to get a feel for what it was good at. Just because a language is "cleaner", may not be enough to get people switch. What is its "unique benefit"? For example, Node.js is good at real-time applications and they make that relatively clear in the sample code on their front page.

I think there was also been more uptake of Javascript, since Jaxer was initially released. There seem to be more back-end developers who now also know Javascript. I would say that's more true now than when Jaxer was released. In other words, maybe it was ahead of its time.

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Personally I liked Jaxer, because you easily could use the same code client and server-side without duplication (such as form validation), however I didn't like, that you had hardly any control over the generated pages, which where propped full of JavaScript even for the most trivial page and made the pages highly depended on JavaScript, which made unobtrusive JavaScript virtually impossible.

So I guess for purely JavaScript-based web apps it's ok, however now there is for example Google Web Toolkit, which is much more powerful, which basicly also allows you to use one language client and server-side.