Saddened by the move to PDT many of the now unhappy users, such as Adam Patterson who has a good blogpost on the subject, have been looking into an alternative yet have found none — at least none which is free. Yes, Zend Studio is a great alternative but that baby will cost you about an arm and a leg; 399 euro worth of arm and leg to be precise. I myself have no problem into buying it myself as it is a great tool, but the technical university I’m teaching at cannot justify total the cost of coughing up the money for the 100 needed licenses as they will only be used for about 3 hours per week during only 1 semester nor can I enforce my students to buy it themselves.

Image by Smashing Magazine

Having sought other free alternatives I ended up most happy with the new Netbeans 6.8. However, it’s not perfect: Netbeans 6.8 clearly has some work to do in order to catch up with the original Aptana PHP plugin, yet I found it better than PDT in terms of use (the ease of creating a new project for example) and features/support (Intellisense/autocompletion and PHPDoc support that work). The – to me – missing feature in Netbeans 6.8 is the lack of an internal debugger. Nearly every time I showcase a bit of code to my students I run it through a debug session. I know, Netbeans 6.8 supports XDebug, but that plugin is a bit too good to the beginning PHP developers: one notice will inject a truckload of HTML with stacktrace and everything related to it — that’s not needed for the newbies as they need to learn to code and debug PHP on a plain PHP install.

Back to Aptana, I’ve used a few Google Coupons and found a way to install the original Aptana PHP plugin into Aptana 2.0. It’s pretty easy actually:

1. In Aptana select Help → Install New Software...
2. Click on the Add button and add a new entry named Aptana PHP Update Site with http://update.aptana.com/install/php as Location. Click OK to add it
3. Select Aptana PHP Update Site from the dropdown and expand PHP Plugin Builds in the list
4. Check Aptana PHP 1.1 Development Environment from the list and press Next
5. Click Finish in the next screen and restart Aptana when asked

The method above however is not bulletproof: once the original update site goes down we won’t be able to install the plugin anymore. To counter that we’d need to have a local copy of Aptana PHP 1.1 Development Environment and be able to install that copy. Luckely for us, that all is possible.

Having played around a bit I noticed that the update URL http://update.aptana.com/install/php redirects to http://update15.aptana.org/php/25753/index.html. Typing that URL in your browser gives you a nice page stating you must enter that URL into Aptana in order install the offered package. The page also states that you can download the offered package and install it from your local disk … wow, that’s just what we needed!

Here’s the updated instructions (I have a local copy of the package myself and will post it here if the update site were ever to go down):

1. Save the offered package (98.5MB) to an easy-to-find location.
2. In Aptana select Help → Install New Software...
3. Click on the Add button and then click the Archive... button, and select the file saved in step 1.
4. Check Aptana PHP 1.1 Development Environment from the list and press Next
5. Click Finish in the next screen and restart Aptana when asked

For now this will help us out. Now, let’s hope that the developers of the Aptana PHP Plugin will push their goodness towards PDT and transform PDT into what the Aptana PHP Plugin once was: a rock solid, (nearly) feature complete and free alternative to Zend Studio. Strange though, that the better product folded in favor of the lesser competitor.