Brit Gardner’s Site

all the code that’s fit to printf()

(I go through this process once a week and forget how I did it every damn time, so this is my reminder.  I published it in case anyone out there is trying to do the same thing.)

This is a pretty specific setup, but works really well for playing around:

• Running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 on EC2 (alestic makes the defacto instance - ami-c0fa1ea9)
• The latest and greatest Jaxer release candidate (http://aptana.com/jaxer/download)
• Using the built-in apache in jaxer
• port 80, publicly accessible

Step 1 - get your instance up and running.  I recommend ElasticFox.  Instance ID I use most often is ami-c0fa1ea9.  (As a quick aside - why don’t I just repackage the instance? Because I want to use the latest and greatest Jaxer and it changes fairly frequently. When Jaxer 1.0 comes out, I’ll repackage the instance if Aptana doesn’t do it themselves.)  Instructions on how to get an AMI up and running are a dime a dozen so I won’t go into them here.

Step 2 - grab a few necessary libs that don’t come with the alestic hardy.

Step 3 - grab the latest jaxer zip from http://aptana.com/jaxer/download

Then follow the instructions Aptana provides for making jaxer publicly accessble.  If you want to run apache safely, I recommend creating its own user:

Make sure to set your User and Group to apache in /opt/AptanaJaxer/Apache22/conf/httpd.conf.

Voila! That should do it. Start jaxer with:

Access your site through http://[public DNS instance name]/aptana and run the diagnostics.

Just found this on google code - google hosts popular javascript libraries that you can load on your site using their ajax API.  They call this their AJAX Libraries API.  Some of the libraries they host:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

Loading a library is dead simple:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>google.load("jquery", "1");</script>

And the cool part is, you can load different versions of the libraries, notice the second parameter in the google.load() call.

Javascript is the new cranberry - It’s in everything! Ok, so this may be old news but I just realized that if you really wanted to, you could build an entire data-driven application using only javascript.

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