We are pleased to announce that Aptana is combining our efforts with those of the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) project, the official set of Eclipse development tools for PHP. We will be contributing various parts of the Aptana PHP plugin to that project. We believe that having a single plugin will be best for the PHP developers community, and look forward to a long and productive relationship with the PDT team.

Even though I had some choice words for Aptana in the past, I think this is a great move and should benefit PHP developers everywhere who rely on Eclipse for their development needs.

Let’s hope this is a sign that Aptana is going to work closer with the Eclipse community in the future.

It’s good to have access to ‘Open Type’ now in PHP development

PDT 2.1 should be released in time for Galileo so try 2.0 out and give any feedback to the PDT team if you want to see new features by the time Galileo ships.

It was very easy to get started using. I skipped the tutorials and dived in and created a project. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s already made a significant difference. For one thing, I have easy access to the functions and classes of PHP 5 with references as to input parameters and return types. Also it does syntax checking automatically, so it’s very easy to track typos and such.

There’s a lot of depth in Eclipse, and I’m just learning the tool. But I am already impressed that it has made me more productive. Using an IDE for development just makes a lot more sense. It feels like a real coding tool, and it is.

So I’ve already said goodbye to Dreamweaver and shifted my development work into Eclipse. It’s open source so it’s free software. The Eclipse Foundation manages the community that develops it.

It’s worked well for me at work, but I’ve used it now at home to modernize Manufactured Environments’ templates into the new module structure available in Movable Type 4.0. Eclipse feels like a good match for the type of tasks I’m using it for – PHP development, XML and XSLT development, and general web work.

Sometimes it’s very nice to hear kind words in a sea of critics.

In the words of Scott Adams, “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”