When I started learning PHP few months ago, I was in search of a good, easy-going IDE and it must be Free. From somewhere I found the link of Aptana Studio version 1.5. In the last two months, I became comfortable with Aptana Studio but my happiness was not to last long. Read in a blog post that Aptana has decided to close their PHP IDE and they will just support the development of Eclipse PDT plugin.
I posted a query on Aptana support forums requesting an answer to why they took decision when their PHP IDE was becoming popular. I got a weird response
that they have decided to support the Eclipse PDT plugin. I also saw similar posts of other users complaining about sudden withdrawal of PHP IDE. I guess no one got a clear response to why Aptana decided this.
Anyways, I continued my PHP development with the version 1.5. Aptana suggested me to stick to this version if I want Aptana taste for PHP development. Yesterday, I decided to download the new version (2.0.2) and install the Eclipse PDT plugin. Everything went well and I was also able to successfully install the Eclipse Subversive SVN plugin. I set the workspace path to my previous version's workspace location. I was able to open my existing projects by checking out them from my SVN repository. But then something unexpected happened. I could not check-in my files back. SVN started giving errors. I closed the new version to see whether my old version (1.5) is running well or not. Another jolt was awaiting. Since I used the same workspace, the newer version had overwritten perspective settings and I was not able to open properly my existing projects. Same SVN errors popping each time I tried to open projects from the Project Explorer. To get rid of this I had to delete my local working folder from the workspace and checkout a new copy from the SVN.
So tweaking with the newer version was smooth except with this workspace issue and I expect Aptana will improve the IDE.
Since you switched to PDT, you might want to check out nWire for PHP: a new code exploration & visualization plugin for Eclipse.
Check out the demo at: http://www.nwiresoftware.com/products/nwire-php
Posted by: Zviki | Nov 19, 2009 at 01:43 PM