Writing web apps with AppJet
by Richard Bradshaw
AppJet bills itself as allowing “instant web programming”. As a relatively competent programmer, I had a look to see whether this tool would be useful to me.
The key feature of AppJet is that it allows you to write code and publish it without having to host it yourself. Any application that you make has a link when using it so that other users can view its source – this means that anything made is by default open source. This makes it pretty easy to learn, as you can check to see how other people are doing things very quickly.
AppJet uses javascript, both for client and server side – pretty unusual. It also includes its own libraries, meaning that you can quickly create Facebook applications, among others.
The demo application is a shoutbox, where users can write messages that persist. It’s viewable here. The source is here. As you can see, it has imported an AppJet library with the line import("storage"); at the top. This allows databases to be used effortlessly.
As mentioned above, there is a library that interfaces with the Facebook API, allowing easy creation of facebook apps – this may well be it’s killer feature in the long term. An example app is shown at http://appjet.com/app/537137228/source. The facebook library speeds up much of the fbml and fql that needs to be used otherwise
AppJet has developed it’s own virtualisation solution to allow users programs to run securely and without affecting each other – pretty interesting stuff!
Made anything neat with AppJet? Let me know in the comments!
