By James Cooley - September 04 2006 tags: eclipse aptana

I started playing with MochiKit - A lightweight Javascript library and every now and again I have a look to see if I can find something like Dreamweaver to do HTML/CSS stuff for free. Nvu looked promising but the last release was June 28th, 2005 so it would appear like the community isn't very active. Looking around I came across Aptana: The Web IDE which is an Eclipse plugin and tries to do JavaScript well. Paul Colton's the guy behind it, previously of JRun and AFLAX: The AJAX Library for the Adobe Flash Platform which also looks interesting. I listened to Paul's podcast (Interview with Aptana IDE Founder) and he seems to wants to do some good. It appears they have VC funding but no revenue model but expect a halo effect to work for them. It's impressive at first glance and I expect it will make my life easier - I'd stopped assembling Eclipse plugins and now mostly just use EasyEclipse.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the license has changed (Aug 2007) from an open source CPL one (which appears to let you use their patented stuff that's included) to one that restricts distribution.