I’ve been using Aptana Studio with the RadRails plugin for my Rails development on Windows. It’s a pretty nice IDE with lots of features, built-in support for Rails (obviously) and, more importantly, is the only way to connect to their Cloud hosting service (which is, quite frankly, awesome).
The upgrade from 1.0 > 1.5 was great. Lots of new, useful features were added…performance gains were made and it felt all-around like a much tighter, well-thought-out execution.
But now they’ve gone to v2.0 and the same cannot be said about this transition.
So many baffling and, in my opinion, downright stupid decisions were made. Plus there are all sorts of performance problems and weird errors that never, EVER once occured in 1.5. For instance:
- No longer is there a “synchronize” option when dealing with local files and Cloud files of the same application. One of the great things about the Cloud is that you can use any computer with Aptana installed. Simply login using you Aptana ID and bam! You’ve got all your Cloud sites right there able to be edited to your heart’s content. And syncing up the latest version of files on the Cloud with your machine was a simple as clicking a button with an upward-facing arrow next to a downward facing arrow. It looked at all the files on both instances of the site, determined which needed to be changed/added where and did it. Now, that same icon is in the IDE but it simply opens up an FTP-style file transfer window. No more synchronizing. Why? Who the hell knows?
- Download no longer downloads your site. At least not as far as I can tell. Even though it was apparently downloading SOMETHING for about 4 minutes earlier, none of my local files were actually overwritten/updated to be what was out on the server.
- It’s no longer obvious when a file is local or Cloud-hosted. They removed the helpful text in the title bar/tab of the file stating (Cloud Hosted) or something similar to let you know which files were remote and which were local in case you had to just quick edit something without going through the whole edit local > upload process.
- Intellisense for Cloud functionality is PAINFULLY laggy. This was never a problem in 1.5. There was slight lag as it undoubtedly connected to the Cloud site to bring back dynamically updated command-line functionality, but it takes upwards of 10 seconds to get a list back and while that’s happening, the IDE is completely useless.
- Cloud connectivity is suspect-at-best. I get errors CONSTANTLY about being unable to connect to the remote server or retrieve file lists or put a file out there. Never ONCE did I receive an error like that in 1.5. Remedying the situation requires sometimes logging out of my Aptana account and logging back in, but usually completely closing the IDE and reopening it is necessary. And there’s no guarantee that if it starts working upon opening up that it will continue to work the entire time you’re in the IDE.
Lots and lots of changes have been made. There are probably more things happening that have annoyed or baffled me that are not detailed above, but these are the ones that came to mind right away. I don’t know why some of these things are happening or why the people at Aptana made so many boneheaded design decisions, but I’m unhappy. I want v1.5 back. I want a functional IDE back with icons that don’t change functionality to something mostly useless. I don’t want inane and nonsensical errors every other time I fire up the IDE to work. All this crap is not only making me not want to use Aptana anymore, but it’s making me dread doing any Rails development because I know it’s going to be a shitshow trying to get this previously near-flawless IDE to do what it is SUPPOSED to do.
And Aptana’s support is a complete joke, but that’s a rant for another time. I hope the next release (which seems to be 3.0 in early 2010) fixes this crap and performs the way 1.5 did.
