I'd read some articles and news items about Aptana Studio Pro, and after reading that it was not only a PHP IDE, but also a full-featured scripting language editor, I had to give it a look--after all, it's free to download, and I'm always looking for a better hammer for my programmer's toolbox. In this article we'll take it for a spin and let you know how it worked out!

He talks about the installation, some of the features it offers for working with non-PHP languages and a few of the quirks he found in creating his first project. You can find out more about the IDE on the Aptana website.

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts. The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

He quickly illustrates (with a few screenshots) how to get the debugger to prompt for the values of the PHP script you've selected. You can also use a similar technique in other Eclipse-based IDEs (like Zend Studio or Aptana).

I'm also posting this since we recently relaunched our screencast site, http://tv.aptana.com. It's actually really cool as its running entirely on Aptana Jaxer, and built with the soon-to-be released Active JS framework

The screencast gives a brief overview of the features the IDE has to offer and gives you a pretty good idea of what the interface is like. You can find out more about the tool on the main Aptana website.

Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we've been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects.

He talks about new features like content assist (adding userland code to the automatic completion), completion of functions with parameters already filled in and a PHP preview server and debugger built right in. You can get more information on the Aptana website.