Alpha Five and Aptana: Next-gen development tools for the cloud?

Back in the early ’90s, the development tools business was pretty hot. Microsoft, Borland, Symantec, and others were constantly outdoing each other to improve developer productivity. But when Windows became the de facto platform, productivity took a major hit. Suddenly you couldn’t write a decent application without reading a 1,000-page copy of Petzold and mastering a plethora of details around event loops, windows handles, and dialog box styles.

It took quite a few years until Windows development tools caught up with release of products like Visual Basic, Delphi, JBuilder, Visual Cafe, and so on. But eventually, it became easy enough for mere mortals to develop GUI applications, which ushered in a whole new era of applications for just about every conceivable departmental need or vertical market requirement. It was a golden age.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Martin Heller looks into Alpha Five V10, and Test Center puts Aptana through its paces | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld’s Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer ]

There’s been a similar phenomena with Web development over the last 10 years. Most of the tools used by Web developers today are primitive compared to the client/server tools of the late ’90s. While there’s no shortage of open source frameworks, libraries, and tools out there, it’s still harder than it should be to build a good Web-based application.

Two recently released products may ultimately provide the kind of developer experience needed to provide a breakthrough in Web-based development: Alpha Five release 10 and Aptana Studio.

Alpha Five is somewhat of a secret weapon in web development. Loads of consultants use Alpha Five to crank out applications for their clients in half or less of the time they would expect. The product has been around for many years, and the latest release provides a form of codeless AJAX development, enabling developers to create Web-based applications with rich user interface controls without having to get dive deep into arcane coding.

But Alpha Five is not just a black box; you can get into the code if you want to. This sort of flexibility is hard to come by, and it gives the product tremendous legs. You can get a free trial from Alpha Five’s site. Even Robert Scoble even came away impressed with the latest release, comparing it to the original Visual Basic release.

Aptana takes a somewhat broader perspective in giving developers a set of Eclipse-based tools, as well as an easy deployment facility for building cloud-based applications. Aptana Studio is a great general-purpose Web development IDE that integrates nicely with the leading AJAX libraries. RadRails, which is built on top of Studio, may well be the best IDE for Ruby ever created. Both provide an on-ramp for easily building Web applications in the cloud. Best of all, Aptana’s development tools are completely free.

If you’re struggling with deadlines on building Web applications, Alpha Five and Aptana may be just what you need.

This story, “Alpha Five and Aptana: Next-gen development tools for the cloud?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development and open source at InfoWorld.com.

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