aptana studio upgrades the IDE paradigm
Aptana Studio is a sweet little IDE, but it gets even sweeter now that they've added in Jaxer and Cloud.
My development life has been veering away from Java and towards JavaScript lately. I'd been coding in IntelliJ IDEA 7.04. It's got intense suites of features for java web development. IntelliJ IDEA 7 is pretty darn nice for javascript, css, and html; until Wednesday, it was my editor of choice. (Version 8 has added some promising javascript support, but I haven't upgraded yet.)
But Aptana Studio has delivered a game-changer: the IDE provides integrated deployment to cloud servers. This is sick, sick, sick. Usually, in order to make a web site available publicly, a developer has to sign up with a hosting provider, register a domain, point DNS to the right name servers, configure Apache, and upload files to the right place, configure Apache some more, etc. That's not rocket science, but it's not what I want to spend my time doing. I want to sit down in the morning and have a proof-of-concept site running by midnight. (Registering a domain and provisioning a site usually takes at least 24 hours.)
Aptana Studio delivered my one-day web 2.0 proof-of-concept deployment goal. Here's how!
- Aptana provides a virtual hosting service, Aptana Cloud.
- I can sign up for and provision a cloud server from within Aptana Studio; they've got a brilliant 21-day-free-trial for a cloud server.
- Standard stuff I'd expect from a virtual hosting provider: Aptana gives me a subdomain, name of my choice, and handles routing. At install time, I can choose which servers I wan to install.
- I write some javascript and html code -- pretty standard stuff.
- In one operation, inside the IDE, I deploy my site to the cloud. Boom. There it is.
- I edit the code. Another cloud sync, and my modified code is running on the remote site.
- I can monitor my cloud's logs within the IDE.