I have been a great fan of Dreamweaver. Even after I migrated to Linux Ubuntu, I still diligently use Dreamweaver (under Wine) for all my coding projects. To say the truth, running Dreamweaver in Linux with wine is not a great experience after all. At times, its performance can be lagging and the font and interface can be rather ugly and unmatching to the whole OS theme. The only reason that I am still using it is because I have not been able to find a worthy replacement for it. Quanta Plus, bluefish, geany, Netbeans, Eclipse, I have tried them all, and in my opinion, they are either not as good, or as user-friendly as Dreamweaver. That is until I found Aptana.

Aptana Studio is a free, open source cross platform compatible IDE that supports a large variety of languages. The default Aptana Studio’s editor comes with full support for HTML, CSS and Javascript. If you are a PHP or Ruby On Rails developer, you can also get it to support the the code you want by adding the respective modules via plugins. Platforms supported by Aptana Studio include PHP, Ruby On Rails, Python, iPhone Web apps, Adobe Air, Nokia and AJAX.

Aptana is based on the popular Eclipse, so if you have been a fan of Eclipse (or Dreamweaver), you shouldn’t have any problem getting used to Aptana. Aptana Studio, which is based on the well-known, open-source Eclipse IDE that is popular among Java developers, focuses on modern web 2.0 development techniques. It features optimizations for Javascript, HTML, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, PHP, CSS and many others. Aptana Studio plugins enable source control and over 1,000 other third-party extensions. There is a pro version (which includes a few other features), but the free version is more then enough for any web developer (from beginner to advance). I personally love Aptana studio, and recommend it to any developer wanting a full featured IDE for building websites, web applications, desktop applications (with the adobe air plugin), etc…

PSPadFinally, for advanced users who work in various programming environments, there is PSPad. It’s a general-purpose programming editor with html syntax highlighting. This small tool has simple controls and handles plain text, yet is extremely capable. Saying you use PSPad for your coding scores you immediate points for technical machismo. There are still many other features in Aptana, such as Cloud hosting, FTP/SFTP support, inbuilt Web server, AJAX server, that I did not mention, either because I have no use for them or I have not tried them out yet. However, for those things that I have used , I must say that I am pretty impress with it.