Saturday, January 26, 2008

Using Aptana Jaxer for search engine friendly pages?

I am interested in Aptana's Jaxer because they seemed to have gotten Gecko to work on the server. From what I have read before, the tricky part is getting Gecko to run without the need for a windowing service (like X-Windows). Maybe Jaxer still needs a windowing service, I have not looked that closely.

I am not so interested in using their runat="server" or server-proxy capabilities, but more interested in getting Jaxer to render my page to the final "onloaded" DOM that could then be sent to a search engine.

However, I have not seen an option yet to tell it "treat the whole page as runat server" or something like that.

Here is what I want to do (condensed from my previous post on searchable ajax):
  • Do the model/view/controller in HTML/CSS/JS. I normally want this all to run in the user's browser.
  • However, for search engine requests, I want to do some Apache rewrite/proxying to a server-side Gecko that would render the DOM as it would look after window.onload, then serialize that DOM as the result of the search engine's request.
I wonder if Jaxer could be used for the "server-side Gecko" part. If so, that would be sweet. That would allow my web app to be indexed by search engines properly, but still give me the development model I want. No special dev work to get search engine benefits.

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