Aptana IDE is one of my favorite free development tools for Ruby on Rails web applications.

Below is a screenshot of Aptana in action… with a small just-created application.

Over the past few months, Aptana has been adding more and more cool features. In addition to the JavaScript, DOM, CSS, HTML, and AJAX Libraries (including Script.aculo.us) offline reference that has been there for a long time, relatively recent additions include:

• Apple iPhone Development Support
  The Apple iPhone Development Plugin (beta) enables the Aptana IDE to
  increase your iPhone development productivity. You’ll need the newest
  version of Aptana (build 15637) to take advantage of it. [screencast]
• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) Support
  Aptana IDE now offers support for Adobe AIR. Adobe AIR allows
  developers to leverage their existing web development skills (HTML,
  JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, and Flex ) to build and deploy rich Internet
  applications (RIA’s) to the desktop. [screencast]
• RadRails plugin
  Along with long-time support for Ruby and Rails, the newest version includes support for managing and installing Rubygems, among others. [screencast]

Aptana IDE is really cool! Kudos to the Aptana team!

My other favorite is NetBeans by Sun. Yes I’m referring to the latest 6.0 Preview, which at this writing is NetBeans 6.0 M10. The NetBeans team is doing really good job too!

I’m a bit sad actually that there are at least two big open source groups developing two open source applications that do roughly the same thing. Both are rich-client platforms. Both is built on Java. Both supports other languages beside Java. Both are… There are just too many similarities (from the user perspective). One notable difference is that NetBeans bundles so many tools in one go (Ruby support, Glassfish, JRuby, etc.)

All in all, we’re living in a good world. There’s only one world anyway, so we can’t exactly say the opposite.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 7:36 am and is filed under Beginner, Enterprise, JRuby, News, Opinions, Plugins, Praises, Rails, Reviews, Tips, Tools, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.