A while ago, I mentioned the release of a new web development IDE called Aptana. The cool thing about Aptana is that it can be downloaded as a standalone IDE or as a plugin for Eclipse.

Aptana is a really nice modern IDE for web development: It has excellent support for CSS and JavaScript and, consequently, AJAX. It also has decent built-in support for FTP and SFTP connections. Especially this last point is something where Eclipse is sorely lacking, and you can’t entirely blame it, since its original purpose was (and is) something larger than just web development.

Whether I end up using Aptana as the Eclipse perspective of choice for HTML or JavaScript or CSS is yet to be determined; however, I guarantee you I’ll be using Aptana for my FTP connectivity. The Aptana folks have a nice screencast demonstrating how easy directly manipulating files via FTP can be with Aptana. It is very reminiscent of the way Dreamweaver handles FTP connections, which is incredibly easy, especially when considering the lack of FTP support in Eclipse.

And regardless of whether you are in the Aptana perspective or not, a project that has a “Synchronized Connection” to an FTP connection will have a “Synchronize” group in the contextual menu that enables you to upload/download/synchronize your project’s files with the FTP connection in any perspective. Nice!