Aptana is announcing the availability this week of RadRails 1.0 for Aptana Studio, providing an Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails.

A development plug-in for Aptana Studio, RadRails 1.0 features IDE capabilities of Aptana and Eclipse as well as access to the Rails shell console for Rails developers. Beginners can use IDE features and configuration wizards to get started quickly while advanced users can access the shell command line interface and Aptana HMTL, CSS and JavaScript authoring. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) library support also offers productivity gains, Aptana said.

Aptana became home of the RadRails community project last year.

Also featured in version 1.0 are automatic indexing of code assets and in-line access to commands and arguments within the Ruby shell. The release has the JRuby interpreter to deliver instant previews within the IDE and integrate with Java as well.

Aptana also is touting Jaxer, an AJAX server offering access to databases, files and networking as well as logging, process management, security and integration.

"Jaxer is a new kind of Web server. It is a Web server optimized for Web pages and applications that use AJAX," said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing at Aptana, in an e-mail.

The product overcomes the obstacle in which Web sites and applications use HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the browser but the server lacked capabilities to deal with these technologies.

HTML, JavaScript and CSS are native to Jaxer along with XMLHttprequests, JSON and DOM scripting. JavaScript can run on the server using the same techniques mastered on the browser, according to Aptana.

"Jaxer provides a unified development model for Web page and application developers since they can write both server-side and client-side JavaScript in the same HTML file," Hakman said. "The Jaxer server executes the server-side scripts on the server and sends the results and the client-side scripts and HTML and CSS to the client for interpretation on the client."

The Jaxer server, currently in a beta release, comes installed with Aptana Studio.