Aptana Studio 1.0 Released!
Wow it's been quite a while since I last posted. In the meantime I've been working hard on RDT and RadRails at Aptana and the job has been great. I'm very lucky to have found a way to work on the open source projects I love full-time.
In that vein I'd like to announce that we've released the 1.0 of Aptana. This release is important for a number of reasons. First, we think the product is good-to-go for everyone. Second, we're announcing a Pro version of the IDE. This version is for users who want to support the project so we can keep going, or who want the extra features and perks that come with a license: nightly build access, priority support, IE Javascript Debugger, SFTP/FTPS support and all sorts of other goodies. The support, nightly builds, SVN access also apply to the other components of what we're now calling Aptana Studio: RadRails, iPhone, PHP and AIR. So if you want to be on the bleeding edge of RadRails/RDT development you'll probably want to look into getting a license.
Keep in mind that while we do offer a pro version for those who'd like to support us or the extra stuff, we are still shipping the same codebase (minus the commercial features) as an open source project under GPL. And we plan to remain an open-source company with an open source product. Here's hoping that model will work for us!
Aptana backs RDT, hires me
I'm proud to announce today that Aptana has hired me to work full-time on RDT, RadRails and integrating that work with their existing Aptana IDE which focuses on CSS, HTML and Javascript.
This announcement means that RDT will now have commercial backing (but will remain open-source and free!) and that you should see RDT and RadRails move forward at a much quicker pace than in the past.
This is also great news for RadRails users and Rails developers in general as integrating the two will give you code completion, outlines, help, debugging and much more across the entire stack - from model to controller to the HTML, ruby code, CSS and Javascript that make up your views.
RadRails dying off?
Kyle Shank of the RadRails team has mentioned that he and Matt are both working on a web startup. Looks like the priority of RadRails is lower for them - after all, RadRails doesn't make money.
It's a shame that this sort of thing happens, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've been working on RDT for nearly 4 years now and I can definitely say that people just don't pay for free things. You can beg for donations, but you shouldn't expect them. Given the amount of time and effort - and the sheer number of downloads - it just doesn't pay the bills to run an open source project that passively solicits donations. I estimate the per-user donations for RDT to be at about 1.4 cents*. And if we take out the one large donor? .00071 cents per user.
That doesn't quite cut it for rent and food, unless of course you get the entire world to use your product.
I wish Kyle and Matt well and hope that others from the community step forward and help lead the project onward.
Update: Looks like RadRails isn't dying off - it's getting new ownership.
* This estimate assumes we count RadRails users as RDT users, because RadRails contains RDT. It also uses just the raw zip downloads from Sourceforge for both projects. There is a large number of users we are not counting here who have downloaded via Eclipse's update site mechanism, and who use RDT from other distributions available.
JRuby guys hired by Sun, Netbeans Ruby IDE to come?
Given the news about Sun hiring the JRuby developers, I thought I should chime my two cents in on the ongoing blog discussions.
First, and foremost, congratulations to Thomas and Charles. This is great news for their project and for Ruby in general. It goes a long way to say that the company behind Java is now supporting a project to run Ruby on the JVM. Maybe now I can give presentations on Ruby at my employer and not be chased with pitchforks and tar.
Next, I'd like to address a number of commenters out there. In particular, Cote': Hi there. There's already a project out there to make Eclipse into a Ruby IDE. I's called RDT and I'm one of the lead developers. It's also the set of plugins that those RadRails guys build on top of. Go check it out. Oh, and Tim Bray should too. He makes no mention of it, but maybe that has to do with politics...
Speaking of politics, the underlying tone behind the news is that Sun is looking to create a Ruby IDE in Netbeans. I have to say I'm a bit torn over this. It's great to see a large company want to create a full Ruby IDE and competition leads to better products for the end users, the Ruby community. But can Sun please get over itself and acknowledge Eclipse exists? It seems a bit of a waste of time for them to roll their own IDE rather than support an existing editor like RDT (or FreeRIDE, or whatever). I guess it's a bit too naive of me to think that they'd do something that didn't push their corporate agenda to some extent. Well, I guess I could always ask IBM to throw me some cash...