RPFJ
10-30-2006, 05:44 PM
Recently our development team has converted over to using the Aptana IDE (http://www.aptana.com/) for our Ajax development. This is an Eclipse-based IDE (Eclipse 3.1 plugin) so anyone familiar with Eclipse and/or Java will feel right at home using this tool.
There are a lot of very nice features including library outlines, code completion, an internal preview window, and other such utilities that make Ajax development a whole lot easier. This is especially true if you are already familiar with Eclipse. Oh, and btw, it is free to use so there's not much not to like about it.
The one thing missing is the documentation piece. The Aptana plugin is very strict in looking for ScriptDoc (http://www.scriptdoc.org/specification.htm) conformance. While the extension library is very well-documented there seems to be some kind of disconnect between the current JSDoc and what the ScriptDoc parser is looking for. The end result is that the documentation popups in the Aptana IDE are very sparse. Some objects/methods are populated correctly based on their documentation and others are not. Many instances of "No Documentation Found" appear when there is in fact a documented comment in the source code.
This appears to be a common issue at the moment because even the standard Yahoo library does not work. The included library of 0.11.1 was modified to work correctly with Aptana but if you want to use an updated library (0.11.4 for example) then you have to live without the documentation.
It's obviously not a high priority at this point but if Aptana catches on elsewhere as it has here then it would really be nice to see the documentation coming through the IDE as intended.
There are a lot of very nice features including library outlines, code completion, an internal preview window, and other such utilities that make Ajax development a whole lot easier. This is especially true if you are already familiar with Eclipse. Oh, and btw, it is free to use so there's not much not to like about it.
The one thing missing is the documentation piece. The Aptana plugin is very strict in looking for ScriptDoc (http://www.scriptdoc.org/specification.htm) conformance. While the extension library is very well-documented there seems to be some kind of disconnect between the current JSDoc and what the ScriptDoc parser is looking for. The end result is that the documentation popups in the Aptana IDE are very sparse. Some objects/methods are populated correctly based on their documentation and others are not. Many instances of "No Documentation Found" appear when there is in fact a documented comment in the source code.
This appears to be a common issue at the moment because even the standard Yahoo library does not work. The included library of 0.11.1 was modified to work correctly with Aptana but if you want to use an updated library (0.11.4 for example) then you have to live without the documentation.
It's obviously not a high priority at this point but if Aptana catches on elsewhere as it has here then it would really be nice to see the documentation coming through the IDE as intended.