June 26, 2008

What’s Aptana Up to?

Ever since they first appeared on the scene, I’ve kept an eye on Aptana. First, because I like knowing about the IDE options available to me for the various languages and technologies I work with but also because they had taken on one of the few Ruby IDEs that I had been comfortable with, RadRails.

Of course, I haven’t been using Aptana recently since most of my recent work has been in PHP and with ExtJS and I hadn’t been really happy with Aptana’s support (as I’d last seen it) for either. So I was excited to hear that there was a new beta version of Aptana available that had better PHP support. And when I checked out the news, I was even more excited to learn that there was also something called Aptana Cloud in the new release!

I did some further checking and all that I read seemed to indicate that this was something that I’d be really interested in 🙂 So I went ahead and applied to be a beta tester yesterday and today in the morning, when I checked my e-mail, there was my invitation to join the beta. Talk about fast!

I was busy most of the morning doing other stuff but just got time to start doing a little work with Aptana. And so far, I like what I see 🙂 There is a new home screen which looks sparkly and pretty and there’s lots of new stuff to discover and explore. Of course, the first thing I did was to create a project based on an existing application that I was working on and then create a Cloud for it. And let me tell you, the Cloud creation couldn’t be any simpler (or faster) even if they tried 🙂

I had my Cloud, and a blank website, up in less than a couple of minutes. Then I used the project synchronization feature in Aptana to upload all my project files to the server. Two or three mouse clicks and the project synchronization was underway. Once the synchronization completed, I took a look at the various server status information displays which are accessible from within Aptana itself. Pretty nifty. I could check on server status, browse the databases on the server and do several other things from one centralized interface!

I then changed one of the project files externally by overwriting the version in the project directory with a different one and tried synchronizing again. Aptana did a comparison of the two sets of files and let me know that the changed file needed to be synchronized again. So far so good! But when I checked, it turns out that Aptana had downloaded the version on the server down to my local machine because the local version was older. Ah well, guess I can’t expect it to be a mind reader :p

There’s a lot of other stuff to explore in the new version of Aptana that I still haven’t gotten around to because the evening’s coming to a close and I have to get going. Hopefully, when I have a spare moment, I’ll be able to come up with another blog entry detailing my further adventures with Aptana Studio …

[pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana01.png” caption=”Aptana Home Page”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana02.png” caption=”My First Cloud Site”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana03.png” caption=”Synchronizing Project”][pg-image src=”http://farook.org/Aptana04.png” caption=”Server Status”]

Tags: Coding, Interesting, Internet
Posted by Fahim at 5:58 pm   Comments (0)

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