Aptana 2.0 != PHP

Aptana… What can I say? It has been a love hate relationship, from poor initial 64bit support. Its lack of efficient FTP support. Its wavering pro features that eventually trickled down to the community version, and then removing the pro version altogether.

I have been using Aptana for years, and have had a lot of frustration over its development. It seemed that every update caused an issue with something I needed or was working before the latest update. But when it came to PHP in my mind it was an excellent tool.

Aptana as you may or may not know is based off of the open source project Eclipse. And like many other applications based on Eclipse (Flex, Zend Studio, and more). But Aptana developed their own PHP Plug-in that was very good, and with version 1.5 of Aptana I think people saw a great improvement.

Now Aptana is toting there IDE as the “Leading IDE for Web APP Development” that could be true, just as long as you are not planning to release a web app based on PHP.

Version 2 was released about a week ago along with the news that if you wanted PHP support that you would have to use the PDT plug-in. This made people upset and disappointed.

To be fair Aptana has not completely ditched PHP, they are now contributing to the PDT project. The only problem is that the PDT project was the reason many people used Aptana in the first pace. It is slow, bloated, and not as easy to use as Aptana’s own PHP plug-in.

So where does that leave us? Well if you look in the discussions many people are voicing outrage and that PDT or Aptana no longer tools they wish to support. Many alternatives have been suggested, many are not free. Coda, Netbeans, and Textmate.

But remember i said that Aptana is now contributing to the PDT project? Well they may have made a poor decision in removing PHP support so soon. Without having something significant accomplished for the PDT project like restoring some of the same functionality that the Aptana PHP plug-in had. If they only waited to announce this migration and released the new PDT with an improvement then I think there reputation might have been spared, the php community is not a YoYo and it is on the way down and may not return back.