Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of Aptana.  (The recent acquisition of the pyDev plugin and its eventual incorporation into the IDE only solidifies that position.)  Their suite of services are quickly turning into the killer app stack for a large majority of web developers including myself and if you’re a developer who hasn’t given Aptana a try, I highly recommend you do – it’s free.

Yes, everything they’re doing has been done before.  And yes bigger and badder players have offerings in the IDE, cloud hosting, and developer community sectors, but it’s all about consolidation baby, and Aptana wins hands down in that arena.

The IDE Is Key

The foundation of any good development stack is not the test or deployment servers.  It’s not the language,  documentation, or even the community.  It’s the IDE, damnit.  Because, really – what connects all the other layers?  It should be the IDE, and that’s exactly what the Aptana IDE does.

The Aptana devs have done an excellent job in providing much more than just a text editor with syntax highlighting.  With the soon to be released Aptana IDE 1.2, you get project management, remote asset management with FTP, SVN and their new aptanacloud interface, database management, code tutorials and assistance for popular libraries and frameworks.

No, Aptana will probably never be as good a PHP editor as Zend Studio.  And it’ll probably never be a replacement for Cyberduck or Filezilla for file management, or Amazon’s web services for cloud computing.  And you’ll probably still try to ping the jQuery docs only to realize they are still slow as hell (good alternative here, btw).  But, in the Get Stuff Done web development world, having a working solution for all these built in to your IDE is invaluable.

The Future is in The Cloud

As a relatively new entrant into the web technology world, I would venture to say that the biggest and most exciting development during my short tenure is Cloud Computing.  But, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – managing Amazon Web Services and EC2 instances is hard work.  Google App Engine fixes the hard work problem, but you’re forced into Google’s narrow framework and constraints.

Aptana’s new Cloud service is right smack-dab in the middle.  You’re given a sliding scale of server size, a couple of customization options, and bam! you’ve got a web server.  There’s no 50 step, command line based, get-one-step-wrong-and-you’re-hosed process to build and deploy a machine instance.  But, you also don’t have the fine-grained control of exactly what software your server runs.

That’s an easy trade-off for the web application developer, because execution on the core functionality of your app is what matters.  No one really cares how you’ve squeezed every last ounce of optimization into your server cluster (though there’s nothing wrong with that pursuit).

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Aptana Cloud is integrated with the Aptana IDE on every level – database management, source control, resource management, deployment, etc. etc?  Yeah, it is and it kicks ass.  Go sign up for the early access program and see for yourself.

Javascript is the New Cranberry

You know how you can walk down the juice aisle at your local grocery store and see 50 different juices and cranberry just seems to be involved with every damn one of them?  That’s javascript in the web world.  More often than not, JSON is the platform of choice for APIs and web services.  AJAX pervades just about every Web 2.0 application.  Hell, it’s even made it into our databases with CouchDB.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that – Jeff Attwood may hate working with javascript – but I kinda sorta almost maybe like it!  Especially when working with frameworks like jQuery, javascript can be a fun experience when it adds interactivity and wow-factor to your web application.

Enter Aptana’s end-to-end Javascript solution – Jaxer.  Damn, they thought of everything!  If web developers are spending so much time in their code interfacing with javascript APIs and writing Javascript UI interactivity, why not put javascript on the server side and use it as your middleware?  I like it.

Hell, I can see in the near future a scenario where Javascript is the only scripting language in an entire application.  Front end javascript, with Jaxer on the server, and CouchDB as the data-store.

Oh, and did I mention that Jaxer is integrated into the Aptana IDE with a debug console, profiler, etc? Ok, you get the point.

So Why Did I Write This?

Sounds like I’m a pretty hardcore Aptana fanboy, doesn’t it?  Well I can assure you the Aptana team hasn’t paid me should be paying me to say all this, damnit.  Oh well, I’ll throw in a diss just for good measure.  For some ungodly reason, the Aptana IDE only just recently added a word wrap feature.  Yes, you read that right – word wrap.  Word.  Wrap.

Ok, they maybe might have had some sort of plausible excuse, but damn – Word. Wrap.  That’s sort of like a television not having volume control, or a keyboard without the tilde – you don’t miss it until you don’t have it.