Introducing EtherPad

Developing an Ajax or JavaScript based application will often make it difficult to handle for a lone developer. Collaboration between developers often happens so that application development could be faster.

This will also ensure quality of the coding since each developer will have to check each other’s work to ensure that the application will be released with the fewest bugs possible.

But it is often a challenge for developers who wanted to collaborate when each developer are not in the same location. They could still collaborate on a project but they are not able to collaborate in real time.

Developers could talk about the project and show each other’s completed tasks, but they cannot work with each other at the same time.

Seeing the need, a new online application was recently launched called EtherPad. This online application tool was developed specifically for JavaScript and Ajax based developers.

Through this tool, developers could share information online and work on the code together.

By sharing work, development of the application is better and it could cut through geographical challenges between developers.

Some would say that the features offered by EtherPad is almost the same offered by online collaboration tools.

The idea of collaboration may be true but instead of a regular collaboration tool, EtherPad was specifically built for Ajax and JavaScript developers.

Whenever a function or any type of coding related to JavaScript, EtherPad recognizes the functions and highlights them so that they would be noticed by developers faster.

Developers could also use the online tool to make some changes so that the script will be ready as soon as they are changed. Unfortunately, the function is only limited to JavaScript.

This online application was developed by Aaron Iba. He is part of AppJet which develops simple yet highly useful online applications.

This online application is not just a useful application but part of their way of getting noticed.

Although they are popular in different developers, they still have to showcase their platform.  The EtherPad is the first application that was developed using the latest platform developed by AppJet.

This platform provides the best of both worlds in JavaScript. It still has server-side push but will still end up in the client side. The idea of the server-side enables real time interaction of application between developers.

If the speed is strictly based on bandwidth, then the application may not work as expected. However, if it uses the local server then it will be significantly boosted and data will be streamed in real time.

EtherPad is still young. There are additional features that are being sought by developers that are not yet available such as Rich Text Formatting and additional programming languages.

AppJet is continuously working on their projects and updates on EtherPad are definitely coming.  This sample of AppJet Web Platform at work has already impressed a lot of developers and they are now looking at the possibility of building an Ajax based application without using too many codes.  EtherPad is just one of the many applications that will come out from AppJet but has caught the attention of different developers because of its usefulness.