Why Phobos?

Why choose Phobos for a scripting environment? What is exciting about Phobos is that it uses Javascript for the server side scripting language. There are plans to plug in other languages as well, but Javascript is supported right out of the box. Javascript is becoming the language that spans environments. Javascript is built into the latest Java Virtual machine and can be used in the Java environment. Javascript is used in every web browser. Javascript is also used in the Mozilla framework which is the foundation for Firefox and the Thunderbird email client. Javascript is easy to learn, and there are millions of examples on the web for doing just about anything.

Phobos gives someone who does scripting, a native scripting environment. Java is powerful, but more complex and you have to deploy a web app to your server. With Phobos, you can deploy a shell web app and then use any html/programming editor to write files and scripts. Phobos will compile and run them when they are requested just like ASP. This is another strength and departure from ASP.NET where you are forced into using a version of Visual Studio.

NetBeans is the main editor for working on a Phobos project. It is a full IDE like Visual Studio and has Phobos javascript debugging as well as editors for html and css. However, if you would rather build something in your favorite html editor, or design software, that will work to.

Some people may say that you could not build large complex websites with classic ASP, but there were plenty of them out there and everyone knows that if you needed complex processing, you used COM components with ASP as the glue. With Phobos you can do the same thing. You can use Phobos as the glue, and you can use any Java objects you would like to, and access them from the scripting environment. That means you can grab an open source Java component and use its functionality without really having to learn Java. The truth is, a large portion of web sites are small and developed by part time developers. In the last five years, Microsoft has discontinued development of VB6, ASP, COM and now Visual Foxpro. Java, PHP, Perl, and many other languages are still going strong. Give open source a try. It is getting easier.

Phobos is still developing and you have direct access to the Sun engineers working on it. Join the mailing list users@phobos.dev.java.net, download Phobos and try porting one of your applications to it.