Comments on: Greg Murray, Ryan Johnson join Aptana to work on Jaxer; ORM and MVC are starter projects

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:34:04 +0000

So maybe Aptana should take all those developers off Jaxer and put them on the IDE. Give them bonuses based on performance gains.

By: AjaxianReader

AjaxianReader — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:44:38 +0000

The idea of Aptana is great, but it was a really bad business decision to base it off of Eclipse. It’s like being a car manufacturer and taking a 1990 Geo Metro, slapping some wings on it, and calling it a super car. You’re still driving around a Geo Metro, so don’t expect anyone to get excited about it.

If they were to rebuild the IDE from the ground up with the goal of being fast and lightweight [read: not based on Eclipse], I would purchase a lifetime license without a second thought. But I can install Eclipse now absolutely free with most of the features Aptana claims and I *still* choose not to use it.

By: GregHouston

GregHouston — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:52:13 +0000

This comment is more about Aptana Studio than Jaxer. I installed Studio 1.1.6 a few days ago to give it a test run. The feature set, particularly if you are building RoR projects is rather impressive, but the performance as Nosredna mentioned above is grueling. I haven’t tested it on my Mac yet, but on my PC, with an Intel Duo Core 2.4Ghz processor and 2MB of RAM, it is sluggish and freezes a lot. Occasionally the UI gets a little screwy during these freezes or it tells me I have ran out of RAM and the application must close. I’ve read that a lot of the performance issues are probably due to it being written in Java. Without these performance issues I would start using Studio full-time and purchase the Pro version in a heartbeat. But with the performance issues it doesn’t really feel like a program for adults in a professional environment, but more like a shiny toy. Features get an A. Performance gets an F. They are in two different leagues.
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One feature however that is glaringly missing–if you are one who likes it–is word wrap. Even WordPad has word wrap. This textarea that I am typing in has word wrap.
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Sadly I am probably going to keep fiddling with Studio for a few more days wishing that it actually performed well and that I could use it, because the feature set really is that cool.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:00:20 +0000

Hmm. I’m using Aptana to build AIR apps and it feels very sluggish. Even compared to other Java editors like Komodo and NetBeans. I keep wishing for some competition in the AIR-building derby.
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Maybe I should try turning off all the IDE auto completion smarts.

By: smith

smith — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:32:54 +0000

@Nosredna: I use it on my (very low traffic) personal site. It’s still in beta, and the 1.0 release candidate should come out this week.

Aptana also has their cloud service in private beta, which supports Jaxer among other things. It’s real slick if you’re already using Aptana Studio (where’s the Vim cloud??), and I’m sure Aptana would prefer you to deploy with their service.

With the quality of the technology and the talent behind it, I’m sure the deployment story will come around.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:55:12 +0000

Does anyone actually use Jaxer? I love the idea, but worry about deployment. A zillion places to get a PHP service. With Jaxer, seems like I’m limiting my possibilities.

By: polterguy

polterguy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:35:43 +0000

[sarcasm]
Great, now we only need the GoF’s 23 patterns implemented in reference implementations before we’ve completely managed to double our entire abstraction model and turned n’tier into (nx2)’tier…
[/sarcasm]
When will they learn…

By: KKFC

KKFC — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:19:04 +0000

Good news for double JS guys:)