Aptana Out of Beta: 1.0 Released

Just noticed that Aptana has been out of beta. In the 2.0 era when everything stays "BETA" forever, this is a rare achievement.

In version 1.0, an open-source Community edition and a commercial Professional edition are available at the same time. The professional edition definitely deserves the nominal price it asked for. But as its name suggests, only professionals really have an urge for that edition. The free Community edition has enough features for 90 percent of its potential users.

My main IDE is still Visual Studio 2005. But the Javascript editor in Aptana is the best I ever seen. Its auto-complete is way better than even the latest Visual Studio 2008 Beta2.

The Best of Both Worlds (Visual Studio + Eclipse)

I use Visual Studio 6.0, 2003 and 2005 every day. But when it comes to write Javascript code, Visual Studio left a lot to be desired.

The emerge of Aptana plug-in make me seriously consider install Eclipse on my development computer. Here is what I do to take advantage of Aptana's superior JS edit functions in my Visual Studio web project.
1. add a simple eclipse project under my web application development folder (this will only add one file to my project: .project);
2. associate "*.aspx" to "Aptana HTML Editor", "*.css" to "Aptana CSS Editor", "*.js" to "Aptana JS Editor";
3. add my JS library to "Code Assistant Profiles";

From now on, no matter I am writing javascript in a .js file or .aspx file, I can use Eclipse. When I am working on C# code and ASP.NET controls, I go back to VS2005.

Please look at the screen-shot to see what Aptana can do: code auto-complete with documentation of parameters, tree structured outline of code file, code refactor, code snippets, to name a few. (a side note: also get "Firebug" for JS and CSS debugging in Firefox.)