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Yes my friends. Dreamweaver is over now. At least for me.

Have you heard of Aptana, the Web IDE? It is based on the Eclipse platform, which I have been already using for Web development since I dumped Windows for good a few months ago.

And I really have to say that I've been missing Dreamweaver during all this time, honestly. I even have to confess that I cheated for a few days and I used it while on a friend's machine, and I felt delighted. Why is it that Macromedia then (and Adobe now) don't do it for Linux? People would really pay for it.

But Aptana is platform-agnostic and it's free (as in speech and as in beer), just like Eclipse. It is available as a standalone download (with or without the bundled JRE in some cases) and it is also available as a plugin for an existing Eclipse installation. It features code completion in all of the Web trio: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is Ajax-oriented and is also aware of several popular JavaScript toolkits and libraries, such as MochiKit, Dojo, AFLAX and my personal choice, Yahoo! UI.

Code-completion pop-up list-boxes show the available tags/attributes/functions/css (depending on the context) along with browser-compatibility icons on the right, so that you can readily see if you are about to use an IE-only or a Gecko-only feature. If you are a Web-standards kind of guy like me, then you'll love it. Here's a screenshot for those who didn't understand this bleeding-edge feature.

And a small note before finishing. Eclipse has another web development toolkit available for everyone: The Web Tools Platform, which is an alternative and a choice. I discovered both recently and I personally prefer Aptana, but having a choice is nice. Feel free to try both, no matter if you're Windows, Linux or Mac. The Open-Source Web Development Environment is here.

Home page
...and common download options.

Blog
Stay up-to-date about Aptana.

Downloads
Detailed download page with additional options.

Screenshots
A good place to have a quick glance ot the main features.

Screencasts
Here you can get a more detailed view at it before downloading. Watch videos to see what it's like to use it.

And that's all. Enjoy it!

I don't know if Yahoo! buying del.icio.us is good news. The acquisition is obviously good for the search giant. Thousands of bookmarks can greatly improve their indexes and the rankings of their search results. But I wonder how del.icio.us fit into their business model. They already have My Web 2.0, which acts like a social bookmarking tool, and that is precisely what del.icio.us is.

If they really want to keep it good for the users, they should stay away from merging both services. Apart from ajax-ish improvements, there are two features that del.icio.us need, two features that would be greatly appreciated among its users: caching of bookmarked sites (to prevent loosing a page in the future due to broken links) and the possibility to have private or selectively shared bookmarks. The former requires an injection of cash, because it needs a lot of storage space, and that is what Yahoo! could make for del.icio.us, to keep it delicious as it is right now.

I feel like there has been an explosion of cool, AJAX-ed, web2.0-ish services in the last few months. Everyone seems to be eager to show up their skills in this new innovative web field, not just from a technological standpoint, but also with new and improved layouts, organization schemes and usability of richer user interfaces, as well as on generating ideas of new original and useful services, or better implementations of existing ones. These web-based rich-client applications are meant to be the word of order in the web of today, like the dot-com's were a few years ago.

Services are of different well-defined categories, like wikis, file sharing, pictures and video sharing, news-feeds aggregators, social bookmarking, personalized homepages serving as a web entry-point, users communities, robotized news and blog crawlers that select the best from the web and present it summarized for you in a homepage, user-centered news sources like digg, emulators of window managers and desktop interfaces, pod-casting and vloging tools, and a few more I guess, including combinations of all these, and combined with other more traditional services like web-mail, calendaring, on-line dating, IM, etc.

I recently talked about some of these categories mentioned above, but I decided to expand a little bit the spectrum because almost everyday, when I sit down at my aggregator in the morning and fetch from all my feeds of choice, I find out about at least one new service I never previously knew about. And I repeat, at least one, because occasionally two or more appear in a single morning!

To better justify these claims I could go on and enumerate here a few examples, like flickr, songbird, netvibes, riya, glide, boltfolio or 23. And not even the big ones are escaping from the phenomenon. Google perhaps was the starter, with Gmail prompting an interest of web developers on Ajax techniques. They now have Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps and their personalized homepage.

Yahoo! was prompted by Google's success, and they improved their services to keep up with the competition. They now have Instant Search and they're also redesigning the web-mail interface (see previous post). And last but not least, Microsoft, the giant of software is also being pushed into it. Windows Live is a live example of what I mean.

As you can see, there are both big ones and small ones. The big ones are trying to maintain/strenghten their dominance, and the small ones are fighting to stand up in between the mainstream providers, or trying to be noticed and be acquired by one of the giants.

If you want to be regularly updated about new services, improvements on old ones, alliances or any other related stuff, be sure to add TechCrunch's feed or some other web2.0 workgroup blog to your aggregator. For instance, directly from TechCrunch's about,

TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies.

Seriously, I don't know how this Mike Arrington is able to keep himself informed, but is great to have him informing the rest of us. Thanks!

I think I will definitely move my blogger blog into this community, and stay. I wrote a few days ago, before making this decision, about the pros and cons of switching. I am also thinking about using Opera as my default web browser again.

I switched from Opera to Firefox almost a year ago, partly because of Gmail’s AJAXed interface, which didn’t work in Opera at the time. Also several modern services using some state-of-the-art non-standard technologies (AJAX mostly) work quite well in the Norwegian browser. Flickr, Yahoo! Instant Search, Google Personalized Homepage and Google News Customization are good examples of this.