Aptana Studio is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for building Ajax web applications. It includes support for JavaScript, HTML, DOM, and CSS with code-completion, outlining, JavaScript debugging, error and warning notification and integrated documentation. Additional plugins allow Aptana Studio to be extended to support Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone and Nokia WRT (Web Runtime).

Aptana Cloud Connect is Aptana’s web hosting and application management service. Cloud Connect provides the infrastructure required to host applications developed using technologies supported by Aptana Studio and is primarily based on Apache, with support for general web/Ajax, PHP, Ruby on Rails and Jaxer. Cloud Connect also supports Java-based web applications which may be deployed and managed using the Cloud service. All applications hosted on Cloud Connect may be developed offline and deployed and managed directly using the Cloud management features included in Aptana Studio. The Cloud Connect service also provides team management, hosted source control (using Subversion), remote editing/preview and application synchronization between local, staging and production environments.

Aptana Jaxer is an open source Ajax web server for building rich web pages and applications using a unified Ajax model wherein both client-side and server-side code can be written in JavaScript. Jaxer’s server-side engine is based on Mozilla Gecko, the same browser engine that is used in the Firefox browser. The Mozilla engine allows Jaxer to provide a server-side DOM in which a page may be manipulated during server-side processing using the techniques familiar to client-side programmers. Jaxer’s server-side JavaScript APIs enable database access, file system access, network communications, user sessions, and other functions typical of web application servers. Jaxer also provides for access to Java objects via the open source DWR project.

As of November 2009 Aptana has significantly scaled back development and support of Jaxer. An Aptana representative noted that “there hasn’t been sufficient adoption to make it a money earning proposition.”

Aptana Studio

Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse and is available as standalone on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux, or as a plugin for Eclipse.

System requirements

• Windows – 512 MB RAM, Pentium 4-level processor
• Mac OS – 512 MB RAM, PowerPC G4/G5, Intel or Mac OS X 10.4+
• Linux – 512 MB RAM, Pentium 4-level processor

Editions

Aptana Studio is available as an open source Community Edition. The previously available features into the paid-for Pro Edition were merged into the Community Edition. All of the features in Pro are now part of the standard Community Edition of Studio, thus Aptana ceased to exist as multiple editions IDE.

Ajax Library Support

Aptana Studio ships with the following Ajax libraries, but more can be added or updated.

• Adobe Spry
• Ext
• Aflax
• Rico
• Prototype
• Mochikit
• Yahoo! UI Library
• Mootools
• Dojo toolkit
• jQuery
• Script.aculo.us

PHP

As of version 2.0, Aptana no longer provides its own php plugin, but has transferred development efforts to the PDT project.

Aptana version 1.5 provides support for developing PHP applications via the add-on PHP plugin. This includes:

• built-in PHP server for previewing within Aptana Studio,
• full code assist, code outlining & code formatting,
• integrated PHP debugger,
• built in Smarty,
• type hierarchy view,
• go to declaration,
• integrated PHP manual (online or local).

RadRails

Aptana Studio supports Ruby on Rails development using RadRails, an open source plugin for the Ruby on Rails framework. This includes:

• integrated Rails shell console,
• default-install and config of Ruby interpreter, database and debugger,
• code completion with type inferencing,
• Code Assist for Ruby, CSS, JS, and HTML inside RHTML files,
• type hierarchy view,
• go to declaration,
• call hierarchy,
• full implementation of RDT (Eclipse’s Ruby Development Tools project).

Python

Aptana Studio provides support for Python in the form of the PyDev plugin. This provides color syntax hilighting, Code Assist, code outlining, debugging and integrated support for Python and Jython interpreters. Aptana announced that their previously commercial available Pydev Extensions are now open sourced.

Adobe AIR Support

Aptana IDE provides some support for Adobe AIR.

Nokia WRT

The Nokia WRT (Web Runtime) plug-in provides support for developing rich mobile apps for Nokia S60 series phones. This includes over 30 models and tens of millions of units around the world. The Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio provides features that enable the creation, editing, testing, and deployment of WRT widgets from within Aptana Studio.

The diagram below shows Nokia WRT development with Aptana Studio. The plug-in includes built-in support for the Nokia Platform Service APIs.

WRT widgets are small, task-focused web applications that are installed and run in the same way as other S60 applications. WRT widgets allow websites or web services to be optimised for use on S60 devices. Because they’re easy to develop and use, WRT widgets are ideal for driving traffic to your website from S60 devices.

Code Assist

Code Assist is similar to completing code statements, by presenting a pop-up with either:

• the supported arguments for the function call begin coded;
• the supported properties and methods on the desired object.

This applies both to built-in functions / methods and to those already coded — but the latter use requires documenting such functions/methods with ScriptDoc, a documentation dialect similar to that used by Javadoc.

Browser support

The Code Assist feature includes information on browser support for JavaScript methods/properties, HTML elements and CSS properties.

FTP/SFTP

Support for uploading downloading and synchronization using FTP and SFTP.

Debugger

Both Pro and Community editions support integrated JavaScript debugging for the Firefox browser. Internet Explorer is supported in the Pro Edition only.

License

Aptana uses a “dual licensing” model. Under this model, users may choose to use the Aptana IDE under the free software/open source GNU General Public License (commonly known as the “GPL”) or under the Aptana Public License (known as the “APL”).

With the GPL license, the Aptana IDE is available free of charge, as long as the redistribution (if any) of the Aptana IDE adheres to the terms of the GPL license. Users may download the software for free, and modify, integrate and distribute it.

Aptana also offers the simplified APL license for organizations that don’t need to redistribute Aptana Studio or its derivatives outside of the company.

License history

• When launched in 2006, Aptana was released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0. They were using the EPL until milestone 8. The first few builds of milestone 9 were licensed under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 until nightly build 16120.
• One nightly build of milestone 9 was licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0 (build 16204)
• Builds after 16204 have been licensed as Freeware with redistribution restrictions licensed under the Aptana Public License, v1.0.
• On September 21 2007, Aptana announced they would be using a dual license: GPL V3 and the freeware APL.

Aptana Jaxer

Aptana Jaxer provides a page-processing environment based on the Mozilla engine. This provides a Gecko-based DOM and SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine to enable pages to be rendered and manipulated on the server before being sent to the browser. Jaxer also provides an Ajax model for performing asynchronous requests to the server. Its client and server APIs allow such requests to be made by simply calling server-side JavaScript functions from the client. Behind the scenes, Jaxer provides the logic required to manage the request and retrieve the response from the server.

Jaxer is not a standalone web server but works with another server such as Apache, Jetty or Tomcat. Jaxer provides server-side DOM and API processing for pages served by the web server before delivering the results to the browser.

Jaxer may be integrated into Aptana Studio via an optional plugin. It is open source (GPL) and available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Solaris.

Source

Aptana is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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History

Once written as a Windows application, the program was rewritten by Lutus in Java as part of his boycott against Microsoft and its product activation features for Windows XP products. To work, Arachnophilia requires the Java 2 runtime environment, release 1.4 or later installed.

Features

The program can import and convert to HTML various RTF documents, tables and outlines from any Windows 95 (and above) compliant application. It supports up to six web browsers, CGI, frames and other languages beside HTML, for instance PHP, Perl, C++, Java, and JavaScript development.

Other features include:

• multiple-document interface
• user-customizable toolbars
• full drag and drop support
• global search and replace
• built-in FTP client
• automatic uploading of files
• user-defined templates

Source

Arachnophilia is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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Unicode support

From the beginning, the program was designed to support Unicode. The author states that “EmEditor supports Unicode natively, and in fact, the whole program is built as a Unicode application.” EmEditor also provides tools for work with various text encodings: automatic encoding detection, Byte Order Mark support, file reload with a different encoding, detection of encoding errors. The program opens a file with any encoding supported in the Windows system, and easily converts from one encoding to another. The program opens Unicode file names and searches for Unicode characters. Within EmEditor, the ability to open and edit files as Unicode makes it the preferred encoding method for multiple language support because it can display multiple languages at the same time.

Plug-ins

EmEditor is extensible via plug-ins written in C/C++. Many features commonly found in text editors, such as Spell Check, Code Folding, and Auto-Complete, are implemented as plug-ins instead of being built in. The editor’s API is available, so that users can write their own plug-ins.

There are 12 plug-ins built into the EmEditor Professional program:

• Diff Plug-in: compares two open documents.
• Explorer Plug-in: shows a custom bar with a tree menu to open documents from the tree.
• FindBar Plug-in: searches documents from within the toolbar.
• HTMLBar Plug-in: shows a toolbar to insert HTML tags and elements.
• Open Documents Plug-in: shows a custom bar to open documents.
• Outline Plug-in: shows outlining of a document in a custom bar and/or in the document.
• Projects Plug-in: shows a custom bar with a tree menu to navigate file systems and do operations against files.
• Search Plug-in: shows a custom bar to search for strings.
• Snippets Plug-in: inserts words and phrases quickly.
• Web Preview Plug-in: shows an embedded web browser to preview the document as it would appear on the web.
• Word Complete Plug-in: suggests completed words when typing.
• Word Count Plug-in: counts the number or words in a document or selection of text.

There are many other additional plug-ins available for download in the Library section of the EmEditor website, such as CSE HTML Validator Plug-in, Align Left Plug-in, and ColorPicker Plug-in.

Besides plug-ins available for the 32-bit edition, there are also plug-ins available for the 64-bit edition.

Scripting macros

The program is scriptable. The scripting engine is based on the Windows Script Host (WSH). Individual EmEditor scripts (macros) are stored as separate text files. Simple scripts can be created with a macro recording utility. By default, the program’s scripts are written in either JavaScript (more precisely, JScript) or in VBScript. In general, the program can be scripted in any scripting language that supports Active Scripting, including Python, Ruby, Perl, and PHP. For instance, the user can write EmEditor scripts in Python after installing the official Python distribution from www.python.org and also Python for Windows Extensions.

The program includes powerful macros. Macros can be written to do almost anything in the program . The program can write macros using any ActiveScript language that is supported by the program. Macros can be defined to record keystrokes and mouse operations. Macros can be assigned to keyboard buttons and toolbar buttons. All defined My Macros are displayed in a macro toolbar. Macros also have a drop down menu in EmEditor with commands such as start, stop and run for the macros. Designed to run independently of the EmEditor program, macros in the program are implemented as a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) file. To conserve system resources, the Dynamic Link Library is only loaded during macro execution.

Large file support

The program can open huge files (up to 248 GB or 2.1 billion lines) with only a little memory. The program uses temporary files for the opening process, to consume only a little memory. When opening a file larger than 248 GB, the program uses a large file controller to monitor the file being opened. The controller specifies the start point, end point, and range of the file. Within the Large File Controller, clicking the Stop button stops the opening process. The unit can be changed between bytes and terabytes.

Tabbed window design

The program includes a tabbed window design. Like tabbed browser applications, EmEditor uses tabbed windows to allow a user to switch between opened documents easily, as well as open many documents easily. A user can drag and drop tab icons to switch document positions or press the mouse middle button to close the tab. The Enable Tabs command on the Window menu allows a user to switch between single and multiple window interface. A user can right-click on the tabs and adjust the way that the tabs are arranged. The tabs can be arranged by Name, Type, Modified, Active, Ascending Order, Descending Order, or Auto Arranged.

Snippets

The Snippets plug-in is installed by default with EmEditor Professional. This plug-in allows you to insert words and phrases quickly. A snippet is a piece of text that you insert into your document and may contain plain text, placeholders, shell code, a macro, or regular expressions to transform text and various built-in and user-defined parameters. In the Snippets plug-in, you can create two types of items – snippets and macros.

Awards

• EmEditor 6.00.2 was awarded a 5/5 cows Editor’s Rating on tucows.
• EmEditor won the Shareware Industry Award for 2008 in the Best Applications category.
• The recently released EmEditor 8.00 was awarded a 5/5 stars Editor’s Rating on CNET’s Download.com on November 18, 2008.

Source

EmEditor is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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Features

Although primarily noted for its breadth of syntax highlighting and text encoding support, Smultron is also noted for its different approach towards column view and multiple tabbing. It can be helpful in the quick creation of websites, and allows the user to utilize and customize shortcuts for other quick coding implementations, and tidy file organization. It includes other features such as split file view, line wrapping, live find/incremental search, a command line utility, line numbers, and an HTML preview. It also makes use of code snippets and hidden preferences that can be modified. There is localization support for Swedish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), English, Czech, French, Hungarian, Finnish, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish.

History

Created and developed by Swedish programmer Peter Borg. It was first seen registered on Sourceforge in May 2004, and has received much support and feedback from the Mac open-source community. The name of the application is derived from the common Swedish Woodland Strawberry, hence the application symbol. Lingon, another program developed by Borg, is named after another common Scandinavian berry. As of July 31, 2009, Borg has announced that he will no longer be developing Smultron.

On September 12, 2009, Borg announced a new version 3.6beta1 to fix bugs introduced with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. He also said he would not be releasing “any more versions for the foreseeable future.”

Source

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A Linux version is planned.

TextMate Bundle Support

A prominent element of the promotion and marketing of e is its ability to run many TextMate bundles directly from the MacroMates CVS repository. Because most bundle commands rely on Unix commands not typically available on Windows, e uses the Cygwin toolset. Bundle commands can therefore use Bash, Unix command line tools, or scripting languages like Ruby or Python. As of v1.1.121 beta e bundle commands can be set to use the native Windows environment. This allows bundle commands access to non-Cygwin interpreters.

A key limitation is the use by many bundles of Mac OS specific commands or applications. These bundles often need porting ranging from minor changes to significant rewriting. Bundles which require Windows-specific changes can be saved in the bundle editor as Windows Cygwin or Windows native. Because bundle commands use the same plist XML format as TextMate, these Windows-specific changes are put in their own sections. This, in theory, allows the e community to contribute back changes to the central MacroMates repository.

Some bundles are included with the e’s base distributions. Additional bundle ports are available under the MIT License from the e Bundles Project.

e also supports text editing via FTP in the form of a plug-in called Remote Projects.

Open source spinoffs

e has also spawned an open source project called wxCocoaDialog. wxCocoaDialog is a Windows port of the Mac OS X CocoaDialog application. wxCocoaDialog provides a set of common GUI controls such as text input, progress bars, yes/no confirmations and more from within a command-line application.

wxCocoaDialog requires no knowledge of the underlying WxWidgets graphics toolkit. Many bundle commands in e and TextMate use (wx)CocoaDialog controls.

Source Release

On March 24th, 2009 Alexander Stigsen, the creator of E Text Editor, released the source code of the software under a non-open source license he calls the “Open Company License”. The license contains the normal clauses of a BSD-style license with an additional clause requiring that any derivatives must also include the licensing code which requires users to pay Stigsen for the software. Stigsen also indicated that while the Windows version would continue to be pay software, the Linux version would be licensed for free.

Source

E Text Editor is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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HomeSite was an HTML editor owned by Adobe Systems (formerly owned by Allaire and Macromedia). Unlike WYSIWYG HTML editors such as FrontPage, HomeSite (just like Dreamweaver) was designed for direct editing, or “hand coding,” of HTML and other website languages. It was available for the Windows platform.

History

It was originally developed in Borland Delphi in 1995 by Bradbury Software (founded by Nick Bradbury), featuring icons that he stole from Sausage Software’s HotDog editor. In fact, many of the ideas were also taken from HotDog, Bradbury himself admitting that he wrote HomeSite after using HotDog and being frustrated with it. In March 1997 Allaire Corp. from Cambridge, Massachusetts (founded by brothers Jeremy and J.J. Allaire) acquired HomeSite and Nick Bradbury joined Allaire. After leaving Allaire in 1998, Nick went on to work on the CSS/xHTML editor TopStyle and the RSS reader FeedDemon. Macromedia acquired Allaire in 2001 and was in turn acquired by Adobe in 2005.

At Allaire, a version of HomeSite was created as an IDE for ColdFusion, selling as ColdFusion Studio. This version was later merged into Coldfusion MX under Macromedia, where it is now called HomeSite+. Development of HomeSite continued in parallel and the standalone HomeSite is still sold separately, whereas HomeSite+ is not.

In the days that HomeSite was under Nick Bradbury, and then part of Allaire, it had an enthusiastic following from its user community. While many software companies at the time had WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creation tools where the user never saw the code, Nick Bradbury created a product that was code centric and popular with those that preferred to work directly in the code, a concept that was dubbed “What You See Is What You Need.” Further he built in a variety of ways that users could customize the user interface and extend the functionality. Allaire kept this concept going as its target market of ColdFusion users were code-centric as well. Allaire developers expanded upon Nick’s original HomeSite capabilities by adding features like built-in scripting, improved syntax coloring, and VTML for tag insight and tag editors.

Nick Bradbury and then Allaire had a policy of having an open support forum for those interested in its products, both current customers and prospects. The fans of HomeSite would contribute to the development of the product by making suggestions on-line and refining those suggestions amongst themselves. The Allaire developers would join in the discussion, participating and really incorporating user suggestions. Allaire used the open forum idea for beta programs as well. Allaire used HomeSite as a relative mass-market product, keeping the price at $99 and using widespread distribution. The idea was to get as many web developers using it as possible and then introducing them to ColdFusion. Allaire drove the HomeSite user community from 25,000 in 1997 to over 400,000 in 2001. The focus was on building the community, not revenue. Users responded to that respect and love for the tool by supporting each other and by creating and sharing a wide variety of HomeSite extensions.

Macromedia licensed a copy of HomeSite to include in Dreamweaver 1.0 when it first shipped. This OEM deal started the relationship between the companies and eventually led to the acquisition of Allaire by Macromedia in 2001. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005.

Adobe has announced that HomeSite development has ended effective May 26, 2009.

Versions

• Homesite 1.x (September 1996)
• Allaire Homesite 2.0
• Allaire HomeSite 3.0 (November 1997)
• Allaire HomeSite 4.0 (November 1998)
• Macromedia HomeSite 5.0 (2001)
• Macromedia HomeSite 5.2 (January 2003)
• Macromedia HomeSite 5.5 (September 2003)

There was also another version called HomeSite+ which was included in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and greater. HomeSite+ had additional functionality for ColdFusion application development, and was generally comparable to the version of HomeSite formerly called ColdFusion Studio. HomeSite+/CF Studio versions parallel standalone HomeSite versions.

Features

• Customizable interface that includes dockable toolbars with custom buttons, a snippet manager with “tag snippets,” and custom dialogs and wizards written in the VTML language.
• Extensively script-able to automate tasks or to perform advanced tasks using JavaScript or VBScript
• Macro recorder can record a series of actions to create scripts for later playback
• Enhanced code snippets save time by creating and saving reusable blocks of code, and can prompt for variable replacement when used.
• Customizable syntax color coding for ASP, CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Perl, PHP, SQL, VBScript, VTML and XHTML. Syntax-coloring parser syntax and examples are available to help users to extend or write their own.
• Search and replace utility
• CSS editing via the included TopStyle Lite, or via integration with the full version of TopStyle, if available
• Check your code with the built-in Code Validator, or use CSE HTML Validator with UI integration
• Customizable code formatting formats your code to standards with Code Sweeper or HTML Tidy.
• Integrated help browser shows installed help docs or HTML-format document sets added by the user. Useful for local, searchable copies of standards, tutorials, language references, etc
• Project management and built-in FTP help manage and upload websites
• Built-in tools for page link-checking, document weight and spell-checking
• Works with source and version control software that supports SCCI, and with other packages via custom toolbars
• Assign keyboard shortcuts to most any function, or to your own scripts or code snippets
• The integrated browser view and the external browser list let you view your edited document quickly in your choice of browsers.
• Available in French and German (older versions only, 5.5 is English-only)
• XHTML 1.0 Support

Availability

Adobe has discontinued HomeSite: http://www.adobe.com/products/homesite/

Source

Macromedia HomeSite is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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Like BBEdit, TextWrangler is not a word processor and so lacks formatting and style options — it is limited to editing and manipulation of plain text, but while this limits desktop publications, it allows for much greater power and flexibility editing text. TextWrangler has features common to most programming text editors, such as syntax highlighting for various programming languages, a find and replace function, spell check, and file comparison. But TextWrangler also includes extensive scripting support using AppleScript, Python, Perl, Shell scripts, and BBEdit’s native Text Factories. TextWrangler’s find and replace allows the use of regular expressions, Python, Perl, and shell scripts can be run directly in the program. TextWrangler also provides numerous options for reformatting text.

As with some other Mac editors, TextWrangler can read and save files in various encodings, including Unicode (various encodings), ASCII, Latin-1 and Latin-9.

TextWrangler is intended for use by programmers, web designers, and others who spend time reading and writing source code.

Source

TextWrangler is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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First released in 1992, this software is currently in its fifth major version. It is produced by Helios Software Solutions.

Features

Key features include:

• the ability to maintain block indents
• automatic code indentation (see indent style)
• regular expression based search and replace, including multiline regex
• macro recording feature to facilitate complex text transformations and data processing.
  • macro feature supports multiple regex searches (and replacements) within a macro
• syntax highlighting (extendable to many different languages)
• ability to call external programs (such as compilers)
  • regex matching can be used to jump to a line number in a file given in the output from external programs (e.g. to locate the cause of a compiler error)
  • automatic integration with Java JDK, if JDK is already on the machine
• large file support
• support for editing multiple files, with tabbed document selection
• block select mode
• synchronized scrolling of multiple files
• clip libraries – snippet management for reusable portions of text to insert into documents
• clipboard history – Allowing textpad to function as a Multiple Clipboard tool
• Bookmarking of lines, therefore allowing users to copy specific lines (e.g. log file error messages), and then paste them to another document.

Clip Library

The Clip Library is a TextPad sidebar that allows users to store small items persistently, and then use them easily. This is done by double clicking clip names in the Clip Library sidebar. In other editors such as Komodo, a clip library is known as ‘snippets’.

TextPad comes with a number of pre-defined clip libraries, including ANSI characters, HTML characters and HTML tags. A very useful clip library is the Clipboard History. This is a list of previous Clipboard contents. So even though the standard Windows Clipboard can only hold one piece of information, the TextPad Clipboard History Clip Library can access a whole history of entries. See also clipboard managers.

You can create your own new clip libraries, and there are many clip libraries available.

Support

Helios Software Solutions offers support with TextPad, although it is requested that you “exhaust every other option” first. There are also FAQ and Tips sections on their website which will solve most users questions. It is suggested that the best way to receive support is to post on the TextPad Forums, where most of the support is from the user community.

Criticism

A lot of the criticism about TextPad is related to the practices of Helios Software Solutions. After the release of TextPad 4.7.3 on June 4, 2004 the only statement that was released from Helios Software Solutions was that “TextPad is still in development”. This had led many to believe TextPad was abandoned. Almost 3 years after the release of TextPad 4.7.3, TextPad 5.0 was released on March 3, 2007. In the release announcement it was stated that TextPad 5.0 is the “first of a planned series of upgrades to TextPad this year.” There have been regular updates since then.

The release of TextPad 5.0, although a welcomed upgrade by many, received a large amount of criticism. TextPad 5.0 was seen as “beta quality” by many users, which needs further development before release. Only a month after the release of TextPad 5.0, Helios Software Solutions released version 5.0.2 which either fixed issues introduced in TextPad 5.0 or reintroduced features from version 4.7.3. The release of version 5.1.0 reintroduced other features from version 4.7.3 together with a German user interface.

Also criticised is that, as of version 5.2.0, TextPad is not Unicode compatible, even though it offers UTF-8 and UTF-16 as encodings in which files can be loaded and saved.

WildEdit

Helios’s program WildEdit is an interactive tool for power users to make the same changes to a set of text files in a folder hierarchy.

Full-featured trial versions of TextPad and WildEdit are available for evaluation, but neither program is advertised as shareware.

Source

TextPad is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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Concept and idea

The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who would have five or six different programs for coding, testing and reference. The lack of full-featured website development platforms equivalent to application development platform Xcode served as the purpose for Coda’s creation.

Development

Currently, little is known about the actual development of Coda. What is known from Steven Frank’s (Panic co-founder) blog is that Coda has been an internal project at Panic for over a year and a half. Assigned to the project were 5 engineers, 3 people on support and testing, one designer, and one Japanese localizer.

Sections

The entire application is divided into six sections (Sites, Edit, Preview, CSS, Terminal, and Books), which are accessed through six tabs at the top of the application. Users can also split the window into multiple sections either vertically or horizontally, to access multiple sections or different files at the same time.

Sites

In Coda, sites are the equivalent of “projects” in many other applications like TextMate. Each site has its own set of files, its own FTP settings, etc. When Coda is closed in the midst of a project and then reopened, the user is presented with exactly what it was like before the application was closed. Another notable feature is the ability to add a Local and Remote version to each site, allowing the user to synchronize the file(s) created, modified or deleted from their local and remote locations.

Files

Coda incorporates a slimmed down version of the company’s popular FTP client, Transmit, dubbed “Transmit Turbo”, which is currently closed-source. The Files portion is a regular FTP, SFTP, FTP+SSL, and WebDAV client, where the user can edit, delete, create, and rename files and folders.

Editor

The editor in Coda incorporates a licensed version of the SubEthaEdit engine, rather than having a custom one, to allow for sharing of documents over the Bonjour network. Coda also has a new Find/Replace mechanism, which allows users to do complex replaces using a method similar to regular expressions.

Coda also recognises specially-formatted comment tags in many syntaxes, called bookmarks, which appear in a separate pane beside the editor called the Code Navigator. Bookmarks allow the user to jump to the corresponding line of text from anywhere in the editor by clicking on the link in the Code Navigator.

Plug-ins

Coda 1.6 and later supports plug-ins, which are scripts usually written in command line programming languages like Cocoa, AppleScript, Perl, or even shell scripting languages like bash, that appear in Coda’s menu bar and do specific tasks like appending URLs or inserting text at a certain point. Plug-ins can either be written using Xcode or through Panic’s free program, the Coda Plug-in Creator.

Source

Coda (web development software) is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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The initial codebase originated from VisualAge. In its default form it is meant for Java developers, consisting of the Java Development Tools (JDT). Users can extend its capabilities by installing plug-ins written for the Eclipse software framework, such as development toolkits for other programming languages, and can write and contribute their own plug-in modules.

Released under the terms of the Eclipse Public License, Eclipse is free and open source software.

Architecture

Eclipse employs plug-ins in order to provide all of its functionality on top of (and including) the runtime system, in contrast to some other applications where functionality is typically hard coded. The runtime system of Eclipse is based on Equinox, an OSGi standard compliant implementation.

This plug-in mechanism is a lightweight software componentry framework. In addition to allowing Eclipse to be extended using other programming languages such as C and Python, the plug-in framework allows Eclipse to work with typesetting languages like LaTeX, networking applications such as telnet, and database management systems. The plug-in architecture supports writing any desired extension to the environment, such as for configuration management. Java and CVS support is provided in the Eclipse SDK, with Subversion support provided by third-party plug-ins.

With the exception of a small run-time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. This means that every plug-in developed integrates with Eclipse in exactly the same way as other plug-ins; in this respect, all features are created equal. Eclipse provides plug-ins for a wide variety of features, some of which are through third parties using both free and commercial models. Examples of plug-ins include UML plug-in for Sequence and other UML diagrams, plug-in for Database explorer, and many others.

The Eclipse SDK includes the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT), offering an IDE with a built-in incremental Java compiler and a full model of the Java source files. This allows for advanced refactoring techniques and code analysis. The IDE also makes use of a workspace, in this case a set of metadata over a flat filespace allowing external file modifications as long as the corresponding workspace “resource” is refreshed afterwards. The Visual Editor project allows interfaces to be created interactively, thus allowing Eclipse to be used as an RAD tool.

Eclipse’s widgets are implemented by a widget toolkit for Java called SWT, unlike most Java applications, which use the Java standard Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) or Swing. Eclipse’s user interface also uses an intermediate GUI layer called JFace, which simplifies the construction of applications based on SWT.

Language packs provide translations into over a dozen natural languages.

Rich Client Platform

Eclipse provides the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) for developing general purpose applications. The following components constitute the rich client platform:

• Equinox OSGi – a standard bundling framework
• Core platform – boot Eclipse, run plug-ins
• Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) – a portable widget toolkit
• JFace – viewer classes to bring model view controller programming to SWT, file buffers, text handling, text editors
• Eclipse Workbench – views, editors, perspectives, wizards

History

Eclipse began as an IBM Canada project. It was developed by Object Technology International (OTI) as a Java-based replacement for the Smalltalk based VisualAge family of IDE products, which itself had been developed by OTI. In November 2001, a consortium was formed to further the development of Eclipse as open source. In January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was created.

Eclipse 3.0 (released on June 21, 2004) selected the OSGi Service Platform specifications as the runtime architecture.

Eclipse was originally released under the Common Public License, but was later relicensed under the Eclipse Public License. The Free Software Foundation has said that both licenses are free software licenses, but are incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Mike Milinkovich, of the Eclipse Foundation commented that moving to the GPL would be considered when version 3 of the GPL was released.

According to Lee Nackman, Chief Technology Officer of IBM’s Rational division at that time and later head of Rational software development and support, the name “Eclipse” was chosen to target Microsoft’s Visual Studio product, and not Sun Microsystems. Ironically, Nackman is now himself a Microsoft employee.

Releases

Since 2006, the Eclipse Foundation has coordinated an annual “Simultaneous Release. Each release includes the Eclipse Platform as well as a number of other Eclipse projects. The purpose is to provide a distribution of Eclipse software with static features and versions. Ostensibly, this simplifies deployment and maintenance for enterprise systems, and others may simply find it convenient. So far, each Simultaneous Release has occurred at the end of June.

Source

Eclipse (software) is posted on Content Management Systems Blog.
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