One of the benefits of being an Aptana Studio Pro user is early access to exciting new features, before everyone else gets them.

Accordingly, we're very excited to have released the first beta of our significantly enhanced support for PHP in Aptana Studio to you. In getting to this milestone we incorporated as much of your feedback and ideas as we could. Your forum posts, ASAP tickets and all the feedback you provide to us helps us make the best products for you -- so keep it coming!
Here's what you'll find when you next update to the latest "nightly" version of Aptana Studio:

Dramatically Improved Content Assist
Here are just a few of the many highlights:
1. Content assist on user defined functions
2. Auto completion of "this->" references.
3. Auto completion of "self::" references.
4. Auto completion of "$variable->" references.
5. Auto completion of "methodCall()->" references.
6. Auto completion of "Class::" references.
7. Auto completion of "$variable::" references.
8. Auto completion of "methodCall()::" references.
9. Auto completion of function/method parameters.
10. PHP type hints for types calculation.
11. PHP doc comment type hints types calculation.
12. Ability to get variable types from "new ClassName()".
13. Ability to calculate infix expression types
14. Performs recursive expression types calculation and some type inferencing

PHP Debugger
The new PHP Debugger is capable of handling breakpoints, watch variables, stepping, and previewing the current state of HTML output. This works even better with the new Built-in PHP Server.

Built-in PHP Server
The CGI versions of PHP are now bundled right out-of-the box so that Aptana Studio is able to serve PHP files with no extra configuration required. Since the server is running through Jetty, you can even use PHP and Jaxer together, on the same page.
We're still considering which PHP extensions to bundle by default, so please let us know if you think something is missing.

PHP Formatting
The PHP Formatter has been upgraded to match the language formatting available for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It supports a great number of features, so please check it out!
We'll be posting screencasts of these features soon, but in the meantime, please try it out and let us know what you like, and what still needs work.

To Download:
1) Install the current version of PHP (from the Aptana Studio Home Page)
2) Change your update preference to "nightly" (Preferences -> Aptana -> Updates)
3) Search for updates.

A full list of what we changed is available in ASAP. Please use that as well to provide any feedback.

We look forward to your input!
Team Aptana

Aptana Jaxer has been updated to 0.9.5 providing increased performance for server-side JavaScript and a host of other enhancements to make End-to-End Ajax development easier.

Aptana Studio users can get the latest via Help > Software Updates. Otherwise, download the latest now.

• Increased Performance
  • Aptana Jaxer's core is now based on Mozilla FireFox Beta3 and thus delivers improved JS performance and memory management.
  • Jaxer now pre-parses scripts to bytecode for faster execution during callbacks.
• More Natural JS Environment
  • Window and document objects on the server-side now parallel more closely how you work with them on the client-side. This means a more natural coding style with server-side JavaScript in Jaxer and a more browser compatible experience.
  • Jaxer no longer inlines external scripts to the page, this allows for correct use of browser cache on client side content and makes 'view source' a much more pleasant experience. This also applies to Jaxer's ClientFramework (the client-side JavaScript Jaxer puts in pages to facilitate callbacks and remote method invocation). Instead such external scripts are cachebusted with the buildnumber so that upgrading the server will automatically expire any old client side cache copies.
  • A new Autoload feature has been added to allow for a script to be cached so that during callbacks the script does not have to be loaded on demand (thus faster) and the previous oncallback function used to setup the callback environment is no longer needed for library loading. A configuration option is provided to expire the script every time the containing page is accessed. This is allows for simpler development and is the configuration with which Jaxer show ships.
• Improved Platform Support
  • Significantly improved Unix support. Jaxer now builds and runs on Solaris too!
  • mySQL support is now also provided for Mac OSX
  • A number of Windows Vista security/UAC related problems have been addressed
• API Enhancements
  • Jaxer's file system API has been updated -- mostly around the 'quick' static method. For example: Jaxer.File.chmod('myfile.tx',0400)
  • A simple Stopwatch timer API now allows for timing measurements in code.

Next week Aptana will be at AjaxWorld (NYC), iPhone Developer Summit (NYC), and EclipseCon (Silicon Valley). Join us. We want to meet you, answer your questions, and get your feedback and ideas to make Aptana Studio and Aptana Jaxer even better for you. (Of course you can do that anytime via our ASAP enhancement request system too).

AjaxWorld, March 18-20, New York, NY
Kevin Hakman presents Aptana Studio: Your Unfair Advantage for AJAX, iPhone, Adobe AIR, PHP and Rails Development and Rapid Development of Enterprise Ajax Apps both on Wednesday, March 19.

iPhone Developer Summit, March 18-20, New York, NY
Also on Wednesday March 19, Kevin Hakman presents Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.

EclipseCon, March 17-19, Santa Clara, CA
Eclipse Monkey committer and Aptana engineer Ingo Muschenetz shares Building Eclipse-based Products: A View From the Trenches on March 18, and Aptana engineer Kevin Sawicki delivers Pimp My Editor with insights for extending and customizing features in Eclipse.

We'll also be at the EclipseCon Ajax focused Birds of a Feather meeting -- check the schedule for details.

I'm happy to announce that RadRails 1.0 has been released today. This release has been a long time coming and includes a lot of new features and polish. We're especially proud of the progress we've made here at Aptana since we took over the project. RadRails 0.7.2 users will definitely want to check out this new release - it offers a more stable environment, full Rails 2.0 support, support for JRuby, and a boatload of new features. For those who want the comprehensive list of changes since the 0.9.3 release, you can find the changelist in ASAP.

The highlights include:

• A new Rails Shell console - A screencast dedicated to this feature is available at aptana.tv.
• Bundled auto-installing gems for rails development
• A Ruby profiler for Pro users
• An RDoc preview view
• Extended RHTML/ERb color preferences
• Code completion for ActiveRecord model fields and finders
• Code completion suggesting method call arguments
• Significant expansion of code warnings and analysis, including syntax changes from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9
• An improved look and feel

These new features join an already impressive set of functionality:

• A Fast Ruby debugger
• RHTML, YML, HTML, JS, and CSS editors with code assist.
• Unit testing integration and GUI
• Refactoring
• Code analysis and warnings
• IDE Scriptable via Ruby
• Much, much more!

Please note that unless you've been using 1.0.0 nightlies Aptana/Eclipse will not automatically update you to 1.0. You'll need to force an install of RadRails 1.0 via the Start Page, Plugins Manager, or Software update mechanism that you used to initially install RadRails. For those who prefer to use the Software Update route, the update site URL for RadRails is: http://update.aptana.com/update/rails/3.2/

The first Adobe AIR Support Pro feature has been released to the nightly update stream. This feature includes a custom application descriptor widget used for editing the application.xml files inside your Adobe AIR projects. It includes fields for various AIR application metadata as well as a interface for adding, editing, and removing file type associations. It also includes selectable controls to manipulate the initial, minimum, and maximum window width and height and the initial position of your main AIR application window.

Screenshots of the new application.xml editor:

• Application properties editor tab
• Window definition editor tab
• File types association and configuration editor tab

For those of you interested in getting the latest, bleeding-edge code, we are currently rolling out nightly updates straight off of trunk for the Rails plugin. We'll soon be updating that to include all plugins, beginning with PHP and AIR.

Hi Everyone,

We've posted a latest version of Aptana Studio version 1.1.1 to the "nightly" and "release candidate" update streams. You can access this update via the Preferences > Aptana > Updates preference page, and choose the "nightly" or "release candidate" options.

This update fixes a number of small but important issues with CSS validation, workspace encoding settings not persisting and other updates. A complete list of fixes is listed here:

http://support.aptana.com/asap/browse/STU/fixforversion/10050

We will roll this update out to all users next week.

Thanks,