[news.eclipse.tools.pdt] Re: aptana php support

[roy@xxxxxxxx (Roy Ganor)]

Hey Guys,

Although I usually ignore posts like this in the PDT newsgroup, this time 
I couldn't help it as this boosts my passion to get PDT better and prove 
that open source based products are better than other closed-source based 
commercial products.

So relating to the comparison you guys did I want to mention:

1. Eclipse is an open-source project, its ecosystem is wonderful, ideas 
are accepted and declined by many people, new directions are investigated 
every day, people raise their thoughts to the public through wiki and 
bugzilla systems, there are several extensions on top of PDT as we open 
our API so that other companies can reuse it. We enjoy from tens of people 
who actively download the nightly bundle and alert us on any stupid thing 
we do, and that is just the beginning since this project is 3 years old 
and the list can be go much longer. Aptana doesn't have this reach 
ecosystem.

2. Most of Eclipse PDT developers are Zend employees - there are bad 
things and good things regarding this. But the most important thing is 
that we live in THE PHP company which knows what best for PHP developers 
as we in contact with the community and other enterprise customers. Aptana 
doesn't have this notion and will not "gain" it in the next future.

3. There are many problems with JavaScript source editing and user 
experience with Eclipse, all are under the Web Tools responsibility and 
will be hopefully handled in next versions. From my experience if 
something is wrong in an open source project - someone will be pissed off 
and fix it! this is not the case in the Aptana editor case (What you see 
is what you get).

4. I don't want to be part of the nasty comparison between PDT and Aptana 
but IMHO Aptana introduces lousy features, if this screencast shows their 
best features I am really not concerned.

So I want to conclude - if you have *any specific issue* that might help 
us improve Eclipse PDT - just say it! we consider any request and we do 
our best to implement it, you can ask users who give us feedback in a 
daily basis and put a thought in our next generation product - Eclipse PDT 
2.0/2.1. If you want to hassle us - that's fine! we enjoy reading it in 
the small and late hours we spend on Eclipse PDT development ;)

Best Regards,
- Roy Ganor
Eclipse PDT Project Lead,
Zend Studio Project Lead,
Zent Technologies LTD.,



Exception e wrote:

> hertzel schreef:
> > my question is it is even close?
> close to what?

> If I look at the screencasts, I think their php-plugin have slightly 
> surpassed pdt . Combined with their stronger support for html, js, css 
> and so forth they are an enormous threat to pdt. Aptana moves incredibly 
> fast. Almost each month they add a new library/plugin/language.
> But I don't know how stable it is.

> I simply don't understand why they can build such huge things (aptana 
> cloud anyone?) with a modest team, while simple features in phpeclipse 
> and pdt, whose teams only focus on php, takes years to come.
> Check out aptana.com and look at their documentation, products, 
> screencasts, tutorials, and bug system: they must use some magic in 
> their office. I don't mean that pdt is particularly slow?I don't have 
> enough insight to judge upon that?but the competitor is apparently at 
> least 4 times stronger.

> I think it will be a matter of a few months before support for php 
> frameworks will arrive in aptana.
> The next competitive advantage in the php-IDE is php 5.3 /6.0 support. I 
> am curious who will be the first.