So here’s me doing my part in the blogospheric memetic proliferation of Aptana. It went live as Aptana Studio 1.0 today. I’ve been beta testing since they’ve had a beta (which was scarcely a week if that) prior to this release.
In the new release they’ve got IE debugging, (sweet!!) SFTP/FTPS, a dedicated JSON editor, (though I’m not sure how this differs so much from the reg-ass JavaScript editor) Project Reporting tools that I assume sift through all the goodies in your project to generate regular reports for management-types. And then priority support on forums. I suppose this last is mostly what you’re paying for, along side the impressive IE debugging.
I hope the Aptana folks make a huge splash. To me, they’ve got the most impressive, well-polished Eclipse distro ever, and I’ve really gotten some mileage out of it, both on the job and off. It’s a great set of features and some great people driving them, and I’d hate to see their product die off.
Is it worth the money for the Pro version? I don’t know. It’s still a moving target. It’s definitely got some bang to it, and is certainly more intuitive/more stable/more easily customizable/prettier than Dreamweaver on my last usage of that product. DW goes for a little over $400, Aptana will be $200 once the $100 discount daze ends. I’ve got a year’s Pro license for free because I was a beta tester. If I get addicted enough to the new features… I think I’d lay down the money. I paid almost a quarter of that for TextMate. I’ve certainly paid more for other software – Cubase, some day I’d like to pick up Ableton Live… Let’s not even talk about video games. (I just got Guitar Hero 3 on Wii, online play is sweeeeet!)
Regardless of what the future holds for them, the Aptana crew has made a major impact on me, personally. They’re a great example of an open source project done right. They’re responsive, they’ve scaled staff well to accommodate the rise in number of users, and have taken on new products/features as well. (RadRails/RDT, PHP, IE debugging, Visual ScriptDoc) It’s also, as I’ve said before on their forums, the first example of a Java product I’ve felt compelled to install on every machine I use. Normally Java to this day seems slow and unworkable to me, but Aptana feels almost native-fast to me.
Good luck, Aptana.