Jester gets some recognition

posted by pete on October 19th, 2007

Jester is a JavaScript implementation of Rails’ popular REST protocol, with syntax modeled after ActiveResource. You can use it to read, create, and save your application’s data in your browser-side code.

• October 25th: I’ll be giving a presentation, followed by a code workshop on Jester at The Ajax Experience in Boston, MA.

• October 29th: I’ve been invited back to present Jester at DemoCamp 15. I think I might be the most prolific DemoCamp presenter.

I have been very excited by the promise of Jester, which I believe could be a disruptive technology. At the time Jester was released by our friend Eric at ThoughtBot in Boston, I was working on a similar library. I called it JMVC, and my goal was to provide Javascript objects which looked and behaved like associated ActiveRecord models. For example, I wanted to be able to query something like:

Company.find(123).employees[2].city.name

I figured that should be possible, and set to work making it so. Not only did Eric beat me out of the gate, his vision was much clearer; what the world needs now is a Javascript implementation of ActiveResource, a part of Rails which allows you to consume a REST-based web service - something very easy to serve up in Rails. While Jester was very different from JMVC, I realized that Eric’s view made the most sense, and so I decided to jump on board and help the project move forward. To this end, I’ve already given one presentation on Jester in July at The Ajax Experience in San Francisco. I got a really bad sunburn on that trip.

Work on Jester has continued through the summer. The library is now properly namespaced, and supports connection to arbitrary remote domains. While a far cry from the JSONRequest object Douglas Crockford has been lobbying for, Jester takes advantage of a security loophole to allow you to call out. This means that mashups of data from different services is possible, without having to call back to the web server to broker these connections.