Posted on on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 by admin, under Articles
The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform development environment. It’s a complete front-end builders dream with support and code-assist for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as a JavaScript debugger. Serverside code is well supported as well with syntax highlighting for PHP, Rials, etc. Plugins are available for everything from AdobeAIR to an iPhone Development Plugin. Misc features such as remote file sync round out the app nicely.
CodeAssist in Aptana is handled quite nicely. Available by default for all Aptana Supported languages, it’s quick and responsive. Small icons appear next to each element (this can be turned off) alerting the user to which browser(s) support the element.
Code Outline is my favorite of all Aptanas features. It makes it quite simple to hop from one place to the other, or find an errant bit of code that’s escaped your recollection, something that becomes more important the longer your document becomes.
FileSync is pretty hot as well. It’s simple pie to use. Just supply the FTP login and path information, and presto, file sync is up and running. You can sync a single file or a whole project.
Projects… As with Dreamweaver you can create a Project to help keep all your files and settings organized on a per project basis, but typically I find this more cumbersome than it’s worth.
File Preview with HTML files is also available, and quite handy. Unfortunately is uses whatever version of IE you have installed to render the previews. Nevertheless, being able to preview your files within the same frame is almost invaluable.
Aptana RadRails is simply marvelous. I know of no other (that’s not saying much though) IDE with such robust RAILS support; generation, refactoring, integrated debugger, code explorer… it’s really quite nice.
All in all, I really suggest you check it out. As a developer weaned on Dreamweaver, moving to Aptana last year was a breath of fresh air.