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The AppJet Blog

What’s Next for AppJetNovember 17 2008

We’ve been busy here at AppJet Headquarters working on some new developer tools. It’s now time to share a preview about what’s coming next.

We originally released AppJet as the easiest way to get a new web app online and hosted, starting with print(”Hello world!”), and it has since expanded to support simple database-backed web apps. Amazingly, over 2,500 apps have been built to date using the AppJet site, many of them pushing the boundaries for our envisioned “simple” use cases.

We realized, however, that in its current form AppJet is not adequate for building more “serious” applications. For example, It would be difficult to implement all of Facebook on top of AppJet, using only 1 file of source code and 50MB of persistent storage.

Historically, many of the best developer tools have emerged from specific applications that required them. During development, the application and tool progressed symbiotically, each to the other’s benefit. So to help AppJet grow into a platform for more serious apps, we have been building a more serious app.

Very soon we are going to release our new, more serious web app to the world. It’s built and hosted entirely on the next version of AppJet, which we may or may not decide to call “JavaScript on Jets” :).

The next step after releasing the app is going to be to release and open-source the new version of AppJet. We aren’

appjet.jar: platform in a jarSeptember 2 2008

platform in a jar

appjet.jar contains all the software you need to host AppJet apps yourself, including the web server, database, and AppJet native libraries.

We have received feedback from some users who worry that apps written on appjet.com are locked in to AppJet hosting forever.  It was never part of our strategy to monopolize hosting of AppJet apps.  On hosting, we think we can compete fairly because our extremely efficient virtualization system gives us an edge.  In any case, lock-in is no longer an issue with AppJet.

This release raises other questions as well:  Is appjet.jar a useful product on its own (without the AppJet hosting and online IDE)?  Should we start an open-source project around this distribution so our users can help make AppJet better?  Would people be interested in building more “serious” apps using this, and with some improvement, could AppJet be preferable to other solutions such as PHP or Django?

We of course have our own ideas about these questions, but yours are much more interesting to us.  So what do you think?  Leave a comment on this blog post or in the forum.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Programming on the WebAugust 18 2008

We have launched The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Programming on the Web.

This interactive tutorial has generated a small splash of press around the net, for example TechCrunch, Ajaxian, WebMonkey, programming.reddit.com, and news.ycombinator.com.

We’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response from beginners who are programming for the first time and writing interesting new apps.

Another response we’re hearing a lot that surprised us is “How come I’ve never heard of AppJet before?” This tells us that we have some work to do in terms of getting the word out. As we continue to spend most of our time developing AppJet the product, this reminds us that we need to remember to stick our heads up and tell people what we’ve been up to.

Panorama of AppJet Mission ControlJuly 24 2008

David stitched together this panoramic image of our office today, and I thought it was pretty sweet.

(click to enlarge)

We’ve Moved!June 17 2008

Dear AppJet users,

Things has been a bit crazy at AppJet as we’ve recently moved our headquarters! Our old headquarters were on the top floor of a skyscraper, so of course we called that the “AppJet Control Tower.”  Now we’re located in San Francisco’s “mission” district, and in the continuing spirit of bad airplane puns, we have thus christened it “AppJet Mission Control.”

We’ve been having a blast setting up our new workspace (and, well, less of a blast cleaning up and moving out of our old one).  We’ve got some super-exciting new features planned for the next couple weeks, but until then, we thought we’d post a few pictures from our move.

Aaron and David after a long night (yeah, sunrise) cleaning our old apartment:

David gleefully preparing his 30″ Apple Cinema Display:

Aaron hidden behind his three screens:

J.D. doing post-processing on these images: