Well I’ve been rather obsessed lately with getting mootools running in a server-side environment. I’ve had some minimal experience with Helma, but I decided to try and build my own. At this point its rather simple, but I have managed to initiate the jetty webserver with mootools and to write java handlers in javascript (again with mootools) to handle my requests. I looked at a few internet posts about doing your own javascript web frameworks, but most I had a hard time getting to work on my local environment as well as my server environment. So after about a month of diving into Rhino documentation and Jetty documentation I’ve got something fairly predictable working.

So what I’d like to do is implement a more dynamic way to include java extensions into the framework such as file manipulation, mail, etc. Right now I have database connection working with MySQL but I think it would be possible to get it working with any JDBC driver such as postgresql or oracle. I’d also like to develop a better templating system with macros similar to Helma or RoR.
So why mootools in a server-side environment? Well, it kind of makes sense to use a language that you can use both server-side and client-side. And javascript has become far more sophisticated and powerful that people could have ever imagined. And Mootools class architecture is dead simple to create an object oriented approach which is perfect for a web framework. And because it uses Rhino to parse the javascript, we can leverage that to include a wealth of java libraries into whatever application that gets developed.

My goals so far is to flesh out my mooserver website with active examples such as a blog and forum. And since Jetty has a cometd implementation, I want to try and work out a comet implementation similar to the dojo example you see fairly available on the internet. And to do more examples using java extensions.

For now you can check it out at http://mooserver.chrisesler.com. I’ll post the source code when I get it more out of test mode.