Way back in 1997, when I started coding for the Web, it was enforced on me by some Dummy book to use NotePad for all my coding. It’s surprising to hear, but even the Dummies Guides acknowledged the purpose of ignoring all those assistive technologies when starting to learn HTML or JavaScript and concentrate on the core language in its purist form. Since then, I have never really ventured into WYSIWYG based web design, apart from when I’m copywriting web content.

Originally, there weren’t many good WYSIWYG editors available. I remember university advocating the use of Microsoft Frontpage for designing websites which, thankfully, I never really agreed with and veered away from the monstrosity as much as I possibly could (difficult when some of the module exams were heavily Frontpage-based).

It was only in 2001 when I started work for Webmastermedia that I really got into Macromedia Ultradev 4 (now known as Dreamweaver). The company, at the time, were heavily ASP-oriented and supplied me with a brand new PC setup with IIS installed and a copy of Ultradev to develop my ASP skills as it seemed to the best environment for developing serverside applications. It was during this time that learned to love the Macromedia environment for web development. It has since become my Weapon of Choice throughout my working day but tend to only use the software (now) as a glorified text editor and file management application.

Earlier on this week, I noticed a new name popping up around the Web - Aptana. From what I could gather, it was meant to be a contender for some of the other free text editors (that I have never managed to grasp). The main selling point for me was the support for the latest JavaScript libraries with auto-complete and documentation for some of the big players such Prototype, Dojo and MochiKit. So off I went and downloaded.

After waiting for the fairly hefty 48MB download to complete (there seemed to be a relatively slow connection with the server - possibly due to high demand), installation was pretty simple and you are then introduced to what seems like your typical (if not a little more friendlier) IDE introduction screen.

So far so good. As well as the latest announcements and tutorials direct from the Aptana website, all the obvious candidates were present once you fired up the workspace (file manager module, document hierarchy tree, debug windows), including all your normal text editor toolbar menus.

The one thing the application is missing is a good remote file synchronization tool (the main reason I have stayed with Dreamweaver) but, with enough demand, I can’t imagine it will be too long before there will be an upgrade including such a feature. Updates seem to be very regular and due to the product being open source, developers are welcome to create their own plugins for the environment.

Another element of the application that could do with some focus is support for server-side languages. This application very much focusses on the front end languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript at the moment. There is a very basic solution for including ASP and PHP in the environment but support isn’t top notch just yet. Saying that, I’m sure it won’t be long before there is a more comprehensive solution.

One final feature that gives Aptana a good hook on the development industry is the fact its cross-platform. Installations are available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, as well as an IDE plugin for Eclipse. I know my Java developer friends will definitely be happy with this and will probably give it a go when they can be prised away from all their other free IDEs.

I’ve only been playing with Aptana for a short while but I’m hoping it will become an integral part of my development environment. Support looks fantastic and, if the current setup is anything to go by, things can only get better. If you’re a web designer, I suggest you pop along to the Aptana website and download a copy right now. Let me know what you think too.