My New Favorite IDE – Eclipse
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, tags: aptana, eclipse, IDE, RadRails, Ruby on Rails, web development
I’ve mentioned Aptana before as a very nice (free) alternative to Dreamweaver if you are primarily a coder like myself. I have been switching back and forth between the two for a while now, undecided on which one is better. On one hand, Dreamweaver has great FTP and site organization with an interface I’m very used to. On the other hand, Aptana is free, cross-platform and is designed more for the web coder than designer. This past week sealed the deal.
I’ve recently started playing with and using Ruby on Rails (it’s great by the way) and I am using Radrails as my editor. Now Radrails isn’t a standalone editor, it is actually a plug-in for Aptana. So with the great extensive Rails support, I can now comfortably leave Dreamweaver behind. But wait, it gets better.
Aside from web development coding, I also do a lot of Java development as well. Wouldn’t it be great to have a single development environment for all 3 languages? Enter Eclipse.
Eclipse
Perhaps this isn’t the first time you’ve heard about Eclipse but what I don’t think a lot of people realize is that Aptana is built upon the Eclipse platform. In fact, Aptana is available as a plug-in for Eclipse! So after installing Eclipse with base Java support, the Aptana plug-in and the Radrails plug-in, you suddenly have a free all-in-one cross platform program for all your coding needs. Additional plug-ins will extend support to pretty much any other language out there.
One criticism of Aptana is its lack of PHP support and that’s where PHPEclipse comes in. It’s not as good as Dreamweaver’s PHP support but for most uses, it’s fine. So with Eclipse’s extensibility, Aptana and its integrated FTP, Radrails and its integrated everything-related-to-rails, you have one powerful web development tool.
Since it is cross-platform, this makes Linux look a little bit sweeter. Oh did I mention you can run it completely off a USB stick? (Instructions to follow soon!)
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