Eclipse updates pt 1

This day has allowed me to explore the capabilities of Eclipse as a standards-based SDK. Perhaps not news to those who already use it for such, but since I use Flash Builder almost exclusively for Flash-based development, this is fresh territory. This further exploration came about as the result of a recent back-end dev project where the IDE options played out as either:

• TextMate
• vi on the Terminal CLI
• Coda

I haven't delved into Coda, though I have a good amount of exposure on the other two. Let me state for the record that I endorse the viability and value of TextMate as an IDE. Now, clarifications duly stated, I would like an IDE that provides:

• managing repositories such as svn and git
• code lookup and completion for JavaScript, including 3rd party libraries
• code lookup and completion for PHP
• bracket pairing assistance that is broadside-of-a-barn obvious
• local file, folder and directory management
• quick access to function and property definitions (cmd-click seeking)
• optionally, FTP management

I'd be happy to address which of these are addressed to my satisfaction in the above-listed IDEs, but for now I will summarily say none of them hit all the targets. That could be due to my own habits - perhaps blinders on my part - I would love nothing more than to be further educated on this. Beyond that, some of the newer PHP frameworks at large (CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony) boast unit testing, and I would prefer an IDE with debugging breakpoints and object inspection so I can see what fury my code hath wrought in the runtime.

Thus far, I have done the following to spec up Eclipse:

1. Update to Eclipse Helios 3.6
2. Install PHP and JavaScript language packs for Eclipse
3. Install eGit for Helios (tested and working)
4. Install Aptana (see mild apprehension*)
5. Install Eclipse Web Tools

*Aptana bills itself as:

a set of application development tools for Web 2.0 and ajax for use with programming languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and Python.

They had a big buzz out of the gate as a premium solution vendor to the open-source community. By late 2009 their revenue stream was lacking to the point of significant downscaling and they have consequently reduced their support and development staff. Their current 2.x release is bemoaned as unpredictable, buggy and meretricious, resulting in retrograde support for the deprecated 1.5 version package. Furthermore, Aptana was aquired less than a month ago by an outfit called Appcelerator. In short, Aptana has a legacy of step-child treatment.

Thus my concern with installing and testing out Aptana. Since it is one of only two commonly-employed means of third-party javascript code completion, I went ahead with it. Installing Aptana is the first step. Following success with that, its proprietary set of plug-ins allows jQuery to work with it. I succeeded with the first part, but unfortunately their plug-in service has proven to be currently offline. On to the next option: Eclipse Web Tools.