When comparing Aptana Studio vs Eclipse with JSDT, the Slant community recommends Eclipse with JSDT for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” Eclipse with JSDT is ranked 34th while Aptana Studio is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse with JSDT is:
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the `+` sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Provides quick fixes
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the +
sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
Pro Smart Code completion
Just like all other IDEs, Eclipse offers you inline code completion (even with any external JS libraries added to the project).
Pro Free and cross-platform
Eclipse runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and is totally free of cost.
Pro Code refactoring
Eclipse's refactoring features are quite similar to Webstorm's. It provides almost the same functionalities which include renaming, moving, and member extraction to make your code tidier
Pro Code auto-completion for brackets and parenthesis
This feature is particularly useful when you've added a lot of nesting in your code and you're unable to recall which opening bracket corresponds to which closing one.
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options available, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Seamless integration with web servers like Apache or Jetty
Eclipse lets you integrate web servers (like Apache or Jetty) into the IDE, which you could use for in-container testing or providing services.
Pro Good integration with git using eGit plugin
Pulling, pushing, staging, stashing, etc., are all available in Eclipse as IDE functionalities.
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 Uses a lot of memory
Eclipse hogs a lot of memory, although this can be controlled by the IDE start-up ini file.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Support and problem solving is difficult to find
The Eclipse forums have more tumbleweed than users. Stack-overflow also has very little info.