Robs Programming Junk: Aptana, FTP, WebDav, PDT and Eclipse

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

I've used Aptana now for quite some time and I was disappointed to hear they were discontinuing PHP development. Not surprising considering the PDT acceptance and integration from everything from Eclipse to Zend as the primary PHP development toolkit. The huge hassle for me was that the FTP and WebDav plugins for Eclipse are useless from a web developer perspective. Frequently I'm challenged with small modifications to existing sites and uploading and downloading with other tools or "importing" and exporting is unrealistic. I would spend more time and effort in setting up a project than making some of the changes on a clients website. This also doesn't address the issues surrounding a team environment where you might need to sync back and forth on the same FTP server with multiple users.

So, after much hassle with Aptana, Eclipse and PHP I figured out how to have everything I need for development. This allows me to continue to use Aptana's FTP/SFTP plugins, JavaScript and jQuery tools as well as use PDT as the development IDE. This also enabled me to use other eclipse plugins I liked the SFTP Plugin which I couldn't get installed in Aptana's standalone version. So here is the process for getting everything you had in Aptana 1.5 working with Aptana 2.0

Step 1. Download and install Eclipse PHP Tools

Step 2. Add Eclipse as a new site and install it as a plugin to Eclipse http://www.aptana.org/studio/plugin This will require a restart of the IDE.

Step 3. After that is complete, go to Window -> My Studio, Click the plugins graphic. Using the Ajax Tab, find Jquery, and click Get It. This runs the update manager, you'll need to select jQuery in the list of ajax plugins. You can optionally install all, but jquery is the only framework I generally use. Restart of IDE Required

Step 4. Window -> Open Perspective, choose Aptana Web

You should then be able to use the file manager to create FTP connections and continue as before.

Apatana folks really need to make this part of the FAQ.

# posted by Rob : 1/05/2010 09:34:00 AM