Aptana Free Web Development Platform

I have, over the last few weeks/months, moved toward supporting more open source freeware for my development choices. Not only for an economic reason, but also to simply see if I could. I have developed happily for many years with the shareware/freeware application NoteTab, which has served me well for many uses, but, unfortunately, has been far too slow to develop further over the last couple of years.

I have also over the years used Dreamweaver, my first version being version 1.2 and currently having version 8 (CS2). Since Macromedia has been swallowed up by Adobe, I have been less excited about the application because I have minimal faith in Adobe to create application with the same usability as Macromedia did.

Over the last few weeks, started working with Aptana, a freely usable development platform, more targeted at the web, and most specifically AJAX development. Apatan is, or appears to be, a fork of the Eclipse environment. Thought I have found it much quicker and easier to get up and running with Aptana. Like Dreamweaver, it has coding, FTP, file synchronization and more all built right in, along with an integrated AJAX server.

As I stated in an earlier post, I am not the complete AJAX evangelist, so I haven't gotten to look at the AJAX server much yet, but I have been coding and managing web sites in Aptana, and I must say, at this point, I am very impressed. It has good code management, sample code, plugins for different platforms and much more. The synchronization features are slow, but pretty cool and the environment itself is customizable to fit the needs of how you develop.

Aptana does phone home to get it's updates, I have had trouble getting them to install on my system, but really, that's the only issue I have encountered. After you set up your project, including the local directory, defining the web root on your hosting server, and set up the FTP information, in it works a lot like Dreamweaver or similar products. It comes with PHP and Ruby on Rails support by plugin as well as Adobe AIR and iPhone development. It does come bundled with a load of popular AJAX libraries and Firefox JavaScript debugging tools.

The "Professional" version, which costs $100 comes with full support, IE JavaScript debugging tools, FTPS, SFTP, JSON editor, access to new features, a vote on new features and more. All stuff which I personally do not need...but if you do need it, $100 may be well worth the expense.

For those of you tired of spending hundreds on a platform to develop on, try out Aptana.