Aptana Studio is an IDE, Integrated Development Environment, that specializes in making it easier for web developers to organize and find resources for their projects. Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Eclipse are two popular examples of IDEs. Aptana provides a lot of the same type of functionality the Visual Studio does, but specializing in web development. Aptana, now at version 2.0.2 (though I did most of my developing in version 1.5), natively handles PHP, HTML, Javascript, and more web app languages.
Aptana is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. The installer for Windows measures in at 99 MB and you can download it directly from the Aptana site without having to sign up. I used Aptana almost exclusively in my developing of Friendstaurant, so I’d like to consider this review fully qualified after spending many hours inside the application. I started out using Notepad++ but realized that the project was going to balloon compared to my normal work and wanted to try out Aptana, which I had heard about a few months prior.
Aptana’s goal is to provide everything a developer needs within the single application so you’re not switching between a folder of files, your text editor, and your FTP application. Everything you need to do should be capable of being done from within Aptana. That also doesn’t mean you’re locked in. If you have a strongly preferred FTP client, you can still easily use that. Aptana provides access to your server as FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SSH and you can opt to synchronize with some cloud hosting provided by Aptana (at a price).
Aptana is not a WYSIWYG editor, so it’s still primarily for hand coders. It works just as well with HTML and CSS as it does with PHP and Javascript. Aptana has a number of features that make it a breeze to use and it simplifies debugging. At its core, Aptana Studio is a solid text editor made for coders: it has line numbering, syntax highlighting, and highlights any changes that have been made since the last save. You can also have multiple files open at the same time with tabs at the top of the window allowing you to switch easily between them. Aptana also allows you to collapse HTML tags like Divs and other pairs of matching tags. One of the more unique and more useful features of Aptana is how it will automatically prompt you in finishing variable names, functions, and the like so it’s less typing for you and less chance of typos.
Aptana also features a Find & Replace capability with regular expression support.
The ability to collapse tags (note the + and – near the line numbers) is very handy for getting simple things out of the way particularly when debugging and jumping between sections of code.
Aptana can fully work with PHP, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, JSON, ScriptDoc, and XML files meaning syntax highlighting and other features will work. It can also work with many other files like plain text where you might be keeping your notes or To Do list.
Aptana only gets better and better from its first impression. With Plugins, you can substantially improve the capabilities of Aptana Studio. From improved working with Ajax, Jquery, and Yahoo! User Interface tools, you can also improve working with PHP files with a plugin for PHP Development Tools and another for Debugger Binaries. You can also give Aptana the ability to work with your favorite version control with a plugin for Subversion integration and another for CVS integration. There are many more plugins beyond the few I listed. You can check them out inside Aptana Studio. Just hit the Plugins button on the Aptana Home tab that comes up when you first launch the program.
Check out Aptana Studio (free) for your next web development project. Also check out the other things Aptana offers like RadRails (an IDE for Ruby on Rails) and their Cloud Connect surface (Cloud Storage).