Software Development: Aptana Studio 1.2
When Java was the primetime language of choice for most companies, it wasn't hard to come up with an IDE or two that would more than suffice in development. A lot of the projects that I worked on fell into one of two categories: IBM or open source. Many of the large-scale big companies working with Java were either backing IBM or Sun Microsystems. If you were an IBM backer, you used IBM's Visual Age for Java as your IDE of choice. If you were a Sun or open source backer, you more than like used a variation of Netbeans. It wasn't hard to find a good Java IDE and most IDE's that were built for Java were very powerful.
When .NET started to become popular, it wasn't hard to find a good development environment there either. After all, .NET was created by Microsoft, and Microsoft builds some the best developer tools out there. You never had to stray far from Visual Studio.
Open source projects that rely on scripting languages are a different matter. There is no definitive IDE. You often have to search around before finally "settling" on something.
When Overmortal began Ruby on Rails development, we started with the "vi" editor, a command line and a web browser. In the months that followed, we searched long and hard for a good IDE before finally choosing RadRails. Since RadRails was built on Eclipse, we were fairly confident in it's usefulness.
RadRails did a great job of making Ruby on Rail development easier, but it was still missing a few good components like CVS support, so we ended up installing Eclipse itself, then installing RadRails as a plugin for Eclipse.
Meanwhile, during our Ruby on Rails development, Overmortal also started developing with Python & Django. We ran into the same issue. What IDE should we use? Luckily, there was a program called PyDev that, like RadRails, was based on Eclipse. It was rather simple to just add it as another plugin.
During the course of this year, our development team had to get new computers, which, of course, means the painful process of reloading all the necessary programs. While re-installing Eclipse and RadRails, we ran into some installation errors caused by a renamed plugin. Rather than trying to work through the issue, we used it as an excuse to give Aptana Studio a try instead of the traditional Eclipse setup.
Aptana Studio is also based on Eclipse, but the company (Aptana) decided to focus on web development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) with AJAX support. By this time, they had also acquired RadRails from the RadRails development team. This was another good reason for us to switch; and consequently, after switching to Aptana Studio, Aptana also ended up acquiring PyDev as well. This meant that Aptana Studio pretty much supported all of our scripting needs.
Aptana Studio truly is a one-stop IDE for scripting languages. It has high quality support for JavaScript, PHP, Ruby on Rail and Python; and even has support for Adobe AIR and iPhone development.
All the various perspectives and views can be daunting at first, but once you get the hang of them, you realize how powerful the application really is.
For our uses at the Overmortal office, we needed seemless integration between developing, MySQL database querying and examinations, version control and SFTP support, along with powerful debugging options. Aptana Studio has all of this, plus specific views and support for Ruby on Rails and Python. It's not a 100% solution. There are still some missing features. But there isn't another IDE out there that comes close for powerful web development.
