The last few evenings, I’ve been rekindling with JavaScript. Up until now, my JavaScript development has been in PSPad. A great text editor, but fairly limited as far as specific formats are concerned. So I started my search for a better IDE and I think I found one.
There isn’t too much competition, but that doesn’t mean that my preferred IDE is dud. Aptana Studio is built on top of Eclipse and extends it with some mighty useful tools and functions. Here are the ones I like the most:
- Debugging of JavaScript. By using a Firefox plugin, it is possible to debug JavaScript code in the Aptana IDE. Up until now, Firebug was all I had. It’s a great tool for the easy stuff. Aptana is for a serious debugging session.
- Remote connections. You can define a remote connection to, for instance, an FTP site. The project you are working on can be synchronized to that site. Transparent an extremely useful, since you no longer need to go outside of the editor to publish your project.
- JavaScript code assist. I don’t think code assist is as useful for JavaScript as it is for Java, but I like it anyway.
And if I may humbly make a few suggestions that would make Aptana Studio even better:
- Support for libraries. Currently you can install code assist support for some popular libraries like jQuery. It is however not possible to indicate that a project depends on jQuery and have Aptana include the JS for you and set everything up. You have to manually add the JS to the project and include it.
- Even more code assist. There isn’t any code assist for libraries Aptana doesn’t know. I know this is probably very difficult in JavaScript, but it would be nice if they could get it to work somehow.
Do you have a favorite JavaScript IDE?
