I finally took the plunge and downloaded Aptana Studio 3. Aptana is an open-source IDE or integrated development environment for web developers. The IDE supports all the latest web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, PHP and Python.

It’s impressive despite having only a couple of hours playing with it. I really like the ‘code assist’ feature that comes with the IDE. I haven’t use all the features yet, but the deployment wizard, git integration, and the built-in terminal, sounds very, very inviting.

The learning curve isn’t steep. It’s just the right level for someone who may be tempted to try using an IDE. Aptana reminds me of Eclipse and a little bit of Textmate. The program does require Java, which my Ubuntu desktop already has installed.

Some people had issues with Git commits and some complaints about the program being resource hungry. I can’t comment on those yet since I’ve only been using it for a couple of hours. My first impression of Aptana Studio 3 is very good.