All right, I'll admit it - I'm an Eclipse hater. For all its popularity among developers and development tool makers, I had long avoided using it. Though I was forced to use it at work for over a year (thanks to Adobe basing its Flex Builder on Eclipse), I was never very happy about it, especially since our PCs' specifications weren't top of the line (Intel P4s, with barely 2 GB of RAM). What made the situation really worse was that we were expected to run a myriad of programs to keep out malware, to comply with regulations, desktop policy, yada yada yada. No prizes for guessing that we were a frustrated lot. And so life went on.
Until a month ago, when I had a look at Aptana, I had no idea that PHP developers had such a fantastic IDE at their disposal. Back when I was using Eclipse, I used some plugins for PHP and also for my favourite language, Perl. However, the integration with Eclipse wasn't as good as I'd hoped, and I was none too pleased with the experience. Then I ran into Aptana one day, and I've never looked back. I was skeptical initially when I realised it was based on Eclipse, but I haven't honestly had any gripes. So far, at any rate.
On my machine (Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, Windows 7), with Opera running with more than 20 tabs open, Firefox with about 4 tabs open, Aptana doesn't cause any noticeable slack in speed.
Some added bonuses that I was delighted to discover were:
- syntax highlighting for Javascript
- autocompletion for a number of AJAX libraries like JQuery, YUI and Scriptaculous
- plugin for Adobe AIR development (yes!)
- plugin for Ruby on Rails
So, at the end of just one month, I'm a convert and will root for Aptana Studio! Go, guys!