When comparing Aptana Studio vs Eclipse Che, the Slant community recommends Eclipse Che for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for Node.js?” Eclipse Che is ranked 6th while Aptana Studio is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse Che is:
Built-in terminal with root access so you can make changes to your running machines. Being able to SSH into the workspace so you can use a desktop IDE is handy.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Available in standalone and Eclipse plugin versions
Aptana Studio has standalone (130.7 MB for Windows) and Eclipse-plugin versions.
Pro HTML5-aware code assist
Aptana's code assist displays which tags are supported by which browsers.
Pro Support for web projects
Aptana was specifically created for web application development. It supports a variety of languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby.
Pro Built-in terminal
Has a built-in terminal emulator from which you can run commands.
Pro Free and open source
Aptana is available for free under the GPL license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Git integration
Aptana provides integrated support for Git to make collaboration and version control easier.
Pro SSH + terminal
Built-in terminal with root access so you can make changes to your running machines. Being able to SSH into the workspace so you can use a desktop IDE is handy.
Pro Custom commands
You can package up custom commands with your workspace and then use them (or share them) with everyone else.
Pro Docker runtimes
You can choose from pre-configured environments for Java, Javascript, C++, PHP, C#, etc., or you can define your own by dropping in a Dockerfile - makes it easy for simple and complex projects.
Pro GIT and SVN VCS support
Projects can be easily imported from any Git or Svn repository hosting service.
Pro Reproducible environment
Pro Portable workspaces
The workspace in Che includes project sources, IDE and the runtime. So if you hand your Che workspace definition to another user and they execute it they will get everything they need to build, run and debug the project.
Also the runtime is in a Docker container so it will work even if the second user is on a different OS than the original user who shared their workspace with them.
Pro Previews
Che does a nice job to automatically map the service:port running in the Docker container (e.g. tomcat on 8080) to the Docker port it actually uses (something in the ephemeral range). You never need to figure that out - it's just made available when you run your server.
Pro Merge tool for VCS
Pro Open-source
Cons
Con Many dependencies
Aptana has a couple of dependencies to keep in mind.
It is built with Java and and has some requirements for the JDK version.
Aptana requires Git, and Eclipse 3.5+ if you are installing it as an Eclipse plugin.
Con No longer updated
Language support is increasingly dated.
Con Slow runtime
Online IDE is much slower than desktop one.