Everyone’s talking about Aptana, the new open source WebDev IDE on the block, currently in a 0.31 beta release. It’s features are listed as:
- Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
- Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
- Error and warning notification for your code
- Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
- Cross-platform support
- Free and open source. (Source available soon)
It’s the code assist function that got me most excited. I’m not a good web developer at all, and I love the code assist features in Visual Studio which really hold your hand through writing even tricky code syntax. In Aptana I was pleased to find that the feature had been very well executed, closing tags and quotes automatically, and providing useful suggestions. However, problems arose when I forgot a tag within which I wanted to nest a series of others, and so some sort of easy ‘off switch’ for the automation would be useful.
The only major feature which Aptana is lacking at the moment as far as I can see is PHP support. The developers say they are working on this, and once it is finished I have no doubt that Aptana will become a valuable part of many web devs, both professional and amateur.
[...] Because of legal and licensing issues, the Java software can’t be distributed with most Linux distributions, as it’s not open source and Sun’s licence is too restrictive. The open sourcing of Java will in theory mean Java will come as standard on new versions of Linux distributions (and will be easy to install on current distributions) opening Linux on the desktop up to a lot of Java-based open source software. In fact, Aptana, which we have looked at here on Gizbuzz, runs on Java and although there is a Linux version, it requires a somewhat daunting Java installation to run. This move should prevent that and ultimately make Linux a more attractive desktop platform. It makes business sense for Sun too - they’ve got a director of open source, Simon Phipps, who is pushing Sun’s open source initiative. [...]