Summary
Aptana Studio is an Eclipse-based IDE focused on Ajax, Ruby, and Rails development. A free version offers JavaScript debugging, HTML, CSS, and Ruby code assist, integration with popular Ajax frameworks, and includes the RadRails development tool, as well as support for Adobe's AIR and Apple's iPhone platforms.
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Several Java-focused IDEs have been built on top of the Eclipse platform already. Eclipse, however, supports development in other languages as well, as Aptana's recently released Studio 1.0 demonstrates.
Aptana is an Ajax- and JavaScript-focused IDE, but it also bundles RadRails, one of the original development tools for Rails. In addition to providing syntax highlighting and basic refactoring for Ruby code, RadRails integrates the running of Rails test suites into the IDE via an interface similar to how most Java IDE's integrate JUnit test runs. Aptana also provides debugging for Rails applications, allowing developers to set breakpoints in Ruby code.
Aptana Studio can be downloaded both as a freestanding IDE, or as a set of plug-ins into an existing Eclipse installation. Aptana also offers a commercial version, providing more team-oriented features and support.
Key features of Aptana Studio 1.0 include:
Ajax Support: HTML/CSS/JavaScript development, Included popular Ajax libraries, JSON editor, JavaScript debugging
Platform/Device Support: Adobe AIR development, iPhone development, Ruby on Rails (RadRails), PHP
Advanced Features: JavaScript/Ruby automation of the development environment
Project Reporting Engine
What do you think of the state of Ruby and Rails IDEs? What IDE do you use for Ruby coding?
Vim. And the shell. With find, grep, awk, sed, command-line perl, cvs/subversion, diff, patch, and makefiles.
The extreme selection/modification power I get with this beats every IDE I've worked in. My experience is that it is very hard to do diff-based development in IDEs - instead, you end up praying that each commit contains what it is supposed to.
Automated refactorings are nice, as are the "jump around the code in .5 instead of 2.5 seconds" features (jump to declaration and similar compared my speed with a command line edit).
Still, to me the value of nicer shell integration and ease of availability is higher than the value of the IDE features.
Examples: With vim, I can work from any machine with an ssh client. With whim, when a file is updated while vim is suspended, it automatically offer to reload it on unsuspend. With vim, I can trivially point the editor at a bunch of files that contain a particular regexp match - after having carefully massaged that list of files using my shell tools, so e.g. the build files are excluded (while stuff that I've stored that isn't set up in the "IDE" can be included).
With an IDE, I'd have to have a copy installed everywhere (or an X client). And if I worked remotely (which e.g. Eclipse seems to support) I would not get the integration.
I am a big fan of Aptana editor. I had used Aptana IDE for 2 years and upgraded it to Aptana studio(community ed.) about 1 month ago. Most useful features are FTP connection, source formatter and JavaScript debugger. Each feature is not unique to the Aptana, but there is no alternative free tool supporting these features altogether, as far as I know. Especialy I welcome source formatter that was not supported in previous versions.