Aptana Eclipse-Based Web IDE

Posted on Jul 31, 2006

You may have heard about this on the latest ColdFusion Weekly Podcast (I actually found this on dzone), but Aptana is a new IDE based on Eclipse that offers code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The CSS code assist alone is huge to me since I have not found a decent CSS editor for Eclipse up to now. The code assist will even let you know the compatibility (Firefox/IE) of the attribute. I am just beginning to test this out, but for the moment it seems like an excellent compliment to CFEclipse.

Comments

jeff I tried installing this, but its not pre-populating the style"" attributes and stuff like that inside of my coldfusion files. Is there a trick to this, or do i need to re-RTFM

Posted By jeff / Posted on 07/31/2006 at 12:56 PM

Goose The downside is that it doesn't support XHTML. :( As far as I have seen, it only supports HTML 4.

Posted By Goose / Posted on 07/31/2006 at 1:37 PM

Brian Rinaldi Jeff, your coldFusion files are handled by the cfeclipse plugin and not by the aptana plugin. You will see the assistance when you open a CSS file. As far as I know, there is no way to have this editor handle any inline CSS code.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 07/31/2006 at 1:43 PM

Peter Boughton Doesn't appear to work with Eclipse 3.2?

org.eclipse.wst.xml_core.feature (1.0.0) requires feature "org.eclipse.rcp (3.1.1)", or equivalent.

Posted By Peter Boughton / Posted on 08/01/2006 at 4:05 AM

Brian Rinaldi I know that 3.2 isn't officially supported yet, but I am running it on 3.2 just fine.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 08/01/2006 at 7:20 AM

Peter Boughton How did you manage that - it wouldn't even let me install?

Can I just copy the files from the standalone version?

Posted By Peter Boughton / Posted on 08/01/2006 at 12:26 PM

Brian Rinaldi I did the standard find and install process using their update site. I didn't hit any snags on it whatsoever.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 08/01/2006 at 12:29 PM

Matt Williams Adding Aptana broke my RDS & Subclipse plugins (Win XP; Eclipse 3.2). However, after some dinking I got them back. Under Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration I clicked the 3rd icon from left which is "Show Disabled Features". Expanding the tree below showed both Subclipse and ColdFusion Plugins (RDS) with a disabled icon. Selecting it and clicking the Enable link to the right made me restart Eclipse and re-enabling that plugin.

At various times I would get some errors about feature.xml. Googling this error told me to delete the site.xml file within the C:\Program Files\Eclipse directory. I'm not sure why this file comes with both the RDS and Subclipse plugins, but it causes problems for me.

By the way, if you need just the RDS plugins and don't want the full FLEX stuff, the most recent files are available for download here:
http://www.cfreport.org/downloads/CF_FB_Extensions.zip

Posted By Matt Williams / Posted on 08/02/2006 at 11:23 AM

joshua cyr I am new to cfeclipse. So far I like it but need some javascript and css support. I found Aptana and installed, but it seems that I must switch back and forth between apana and cfeclipse. Maybe I am just not understanding, but are people here able to have both perspectives working at the same time?

Posted By joshua cyr / Posted on 11/09/2006 at 7:22 PM

Brian Rinaldi No, you can't have the CSS support within the CFEclipse perspective unfortunately.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 11/09/2006 at 7:58 PM

Alx order to install features:
1.Eclipse 3.2
2.Aptana
3.Subversion
4.PHPEclipse
otherwise it crashes :(
And you have really "Dreamweaver killer"!

Posted By Alx / Posted on 04/04/2007 at 7:09 AM

Write your comment



(it will not be displayed)





About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.