Aptana Studio Released!

I am truly impressed with what this group has brought to the development community.  Long ago I loved a code editor called "HomeSite+" which existed in several interesting flavors, ColdFusion Studio (i think?), and JRun Studio were two other flavors I remember. 

Then came the Dreamweaver shift...  I never really got on that bandwagon.  I resisted for a LONG time, then I tried it out, and just never really was thrilled with it.  I am a coder at heart.

Then came Eclipse.  Great concept, just not for the masses.  Then came Eclipse 3, and then CFEclipse... then came Flex Builder and the RDS plugins, all good still, but not thrilling.

HomeSite was great at letting you develop remotely.  Thats a big no-no in the software world now, but for web developers it is a big deal.  You don't always have _everything_ you need running on your laptop!

Anyway, I got off track.  After all these tools, finally comes an attempt to bring it all together: Aptana Studio.  In its development stage as Aptana IDE, I fell in love with it (well, with MOST of it anyway...).  It all runs on Eclipse, and gives the basic developer everything he or she needs to code html, php, javascript, xml, css, etc.  All the things that were either missing, or painfully buggy or incomplete in Eclipse.  Not to mention an FTP (and secure FTP) system that actually works!  And you can create new empty files on remote ftp servers too (a lot of us have been waiting for this feature for a while).

I can now safely say that I have found my HomeSite+ replacement :)

Download it, you know you want to: http://www.aptana.com/ (its free)

FYI, Aptana  was founded by Paul Colton, formerly of Allair.  If you can remember back that far, Allair was the company that originally built ColdFusion, before it was bought by Macromedia (and subsequently by Adobe).