Appjet, a web based javascript application development platform, sent out an email to members today that they are closing down the service.

According to the email, they are closing their Appjet service because of the success of Etherpad - which is a real time document collaboration service that they built on Appjet. I think what they really mean is, appjet isn’t making any money and has become a liability. In that case, they just didn’t find a good way to capitalize on what they have, because it is quite awesome.

Appjet has been the only server side JavaScript development platform that offered a web based editor so you could create applications with just a connection to the internet, nothing else. There are many server side JavaScript alternatives, and many JavaScript Application development Platforms, none had the simplicity Appjet had. Nor is there a platform that encourages the sharing of libraries amongst developers like Appjet.

I have quite a few applications running on Appjet. One the fetches updates from freelance sites and posts it to a twitter account, freelance_jobs. Another pings websites and keeps a log of their uptime.Yet another acts as a proxy allowing RSS feeds to be fetched cross domain as a JSON callback. Theres even one that allows to to cheat at facebook’s wordtwist game by guessing all the possible combinations of words available for that round. There’s more then 10 of these apps I wrote and they were all hosted freely by Appjet. These were all developed in my spare time and at first I thought of them only as fun apps, but a few of them have become quite useful.

Now comes the porting of these apps to a new location. The great thing is that the appjet engine is available for download.

I’m considering installing this on my own server, or just rewriting everything in PHP.

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