Following their recent acquisition by Google, AppJet announced they would open source EtherPad, the collaborative, real-time, notepad. That’s now done, and you can find the project home at – surprise, surprise – Google Code.
What’s especially cool about this is that Etherpad is Javascript on both sides of the wire. In a new ReadWriteWeb article on Server-Side Javascript, I wrote that EtherPad is probably the most popular site powered by Javascript (anyone want to up the ante?). As server-side Javascript is getting interesting again, with Comet a major driver, it’s a big deal that we now have the entire source tree for a Comet-style, server-side Javascript, application that’s been proven in the real world.
AppJet also released appjet.jar when they discontinued the general server-side Javascript platform earlier this year. Unfortunately, the download link is broken on AppJet.com, so I don’t know if there’s any way to get hold of the official version. It does, however, live on as a cloud-hosted offering at JGate.