When comparing Aptana Studio vs phpDesigner, the Slant community recommends Aptana Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs or editors for PHP?” Aptana Studio is ranked 12th while phpDesigner is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Aptana Studio is:
Aptana Studio has standalone (130.7 MB for Windows) and Eclipse-plugin versions.
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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 Live error checking
phpDesigner checks for errors as code is written showing the actual PHP error messges. Code does not need to be run to find missing braces or semicolons.
Pro Xdebug support
Xdebug is a PHP extension that adds debugging and profiling capabilities.
Pro Has a free 30-day trial
Pro PHP & JS frameworks support
Includes support for PHP frameworks such as Zend, CodeIgniter, Yii and Symfony and JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, ExtJS, Yui, Dojo. MooTools and Prototype.
Pro Git and SVN integration
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Con No longer updated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 Not free
Not free!
Con SFTP support is somewhat lacking
Socket timeouts aren't handled well and sometimes result in an inability to save remote work.
Con Small development team
The development team consists of one person, Michael Pham, and further development relies solely on his continued interest in the project.