LeoTech

John Resig writes very positively about Jaxer. It runs Javascript on the server while serving documents to the client, with seamless communication between JS on the client and JS on the server.

Jaxer provides:

1. Full DOM on the server
2. Shared code between client and server
3. Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript
4. Familiar APIs
5. Integration with PHP, Java, Rails, etc. apps

In other news, IE8 will use the latest rendering mode by default for documents with the HTML5 doctype:

Finally, Good Math has a published a good defense of Google’s MapReduce algorithm.

Base2 has just come out in beta on Google Code. It’s hosted there and can be included straight off the Google Code server.

I think it’s a really neat library because it basically fixes all browsers so that the built-in DOM, events, etc work the same way. Instead of providing an API of its own, it makes the existing API work consistently and reliably.

Base2 Features:
- A fast implementation of the Selectors API
- Fixes broken browser implementations of the DOM events module including document.createEvent(), dispatchEvent(), addEventListener(), etc
- Supports DOMContentLoaded
- Fixes getAttribute()/hasAttribute()/setAttribute() (Internet Explorer)
- Implements a few other useful DOM methods like getComputedStyle() and compareDocumentPosition()
- Supports a variety of browsers including ancient browsers like IE5.0 (Windows and Mac)

Dean Edwards has also done the excellent Packer Javascript minifier. It has probably the most in-depth support for obscure language features that simpler minifiers tend to mangle.