I'm not sure if I'm missing something. If Aptana is entirely based on Eclipse, why would anyone choose it, when they can get the original Eclipse (especially that the Eclipse development is not lagging in anyway)? I understand why/benefits Aptana started their project, but why would I use theirs instead of Eclipse? I don't know much about this IDE and I'm still trying to choose, so maybe I'm missing something that's obvious to the rest.
+1
A:
I think they come with proprietary plugins that you can't necessarily get with a stock install of Eclipse. Same with the Zend IDE. You can get most of the same functionality with Eclipse but you have to install it yourself and you get no support that way.
Darrell Brogdon
2009-11-21 04:33:44
thanks for the clarification.
drummer
2009-11-21 06:11:15
+4
A:
NetBeans isn't based on Eclipse -- it's from Sun, who traditionally haven't been a supporter of Eclipse (look at the names).
Aptana is a helpful packaging of a variety of useful web and scripting development tools. The nice thing about Aptana is that you just download it and it works. Aptana also provides a commercial version with a variety of additional features.
You may also want to look at Genuitec's MyEclipse, which packages up a variety of other components and provides some support for minimal cost.
Pridkett
2009-11-21 04:38:44
+1
A:
As has already been stated, Aptana simply provides a nice set of plugins that work together to ease development. That's one reason to use it. Not only do you get the advantage of the Aptana plugins, but you get the Eclipse platform itself, which is still extensible, even beyond what Aptana does.
I have another reason as well: I run a dual boot system, XP/Ubuntu, and for development I like to use the same software in both OS's. I ran into problems using PHPEclipse on Ubuntu, so I switched to Aptana.