gnapse corner

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 wonder if they really mean it, or is just a catchy title to grab some attention so that people go and click on it on their aggregators. Here we have this article titled Web 4.0 which is nonsense to me. First, all those stories about Web 3.0, which was and still is a good analogy to refer to what comes next. But it ends just there. Web 3.0 is still referring to what comes next, because Web 2.0 is in its infancy. And today I see this Web 4.0 thing, which makes me think that people are trying to go too far ahead without having passed through all the way there.

It's not the article itself, is what it talks about. It turns out that the terms Web n.0 appear all over the web in a more or less decreasing order, according to Google's graphic shown. I wonder why would someone want to name or mention in their pages something like "Web 8.0".

Less than a month ago I wrote about Opera integration with its own community site, so that it would be a great advantage for those of us members of the community. But I suspected nothing on how this idea can be scaled up to be related with the notion of an online operating system based on the browser and other "connected" applications. I was actually thinking small when I wrote that.

And this (rather outdated) post over here depicts a similar but scaled scenario, that would be great if Opera (the company) would dare to implement. The author talks about how he thinks an online (web-based) operating system might be, and I pretty much agree with him. Perhaps something like this is what Opera needs to become the real killer application that it should be. Opera is currently the best browser out there in terms of features, speed, accessibility, standards support, functionality, stability, security, etc. But it should be evident for most of us Opera supporters, that in the world of today, even all these is not enough. It doesn't generates the hype that could get this piece of software to the place it belongs to.

I have to admit though, that the most likely to develop something like this is Google and perhaps Yahoo. But Opera has to do something, because today is the aggregated value the one that matters the most, not the intrinsic real value. Take for instance the Google search engine. Google is not a search company anymore, they're more like an advertising company. The vision of "organizing the world's information" is just a facade. What does gtalk has to do with that? Now take Opera. The vision of being "the fastest browser on earth" is not enough. And the small (albeit loyal) user base that we are, will not maintain the company.

And going a little bit off topic now (but no so much). Today I've spent a little bit more time on the Internet than usual, perhaps because I've been out of it for most of the last two weeks, busy with the celebrations and all that. And I've been reading a lot of new things about the not-so-new concept of a web-based operating system. It seems that the arrival of the new year has awaken the dreams of many people claiming that, in spite of the exciting year that passed away, 2006 will be even more exiting in terms of web technologies, trends and all that. We are witnessing (live) the rebirth of a whole set of technologies with enormous social, cultural and political implications. The web is reshaping herself just in front of us.

Things like tagging, social software, folksonomy, standards, simple over complicated, small dedicated applications over one-app-fits-all-needs, feeds, communities, wisdom of the crowds, user-generated content, decentralization of web publishing, etc. All these and other stuff are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily experience and interaction with what started up being just a markup language.

See what I meant when I talked about a web 2.0 explosion? In terms of Ajax Desktops alone, the explosion is noticeable. Mike Arrington from TechCrunch wrote an entry in his blog titled "Ajax Desktops won't stop".

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!