Aptana Studio is an open source web programming IDE. It has many great features including javascript debugging, code completion, and support for a wide variety scripting languages used on the web (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Python, ect). It also has built in support for many JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and MooTools. Aptana is built on the Eclipse platform which means you also have access to a huge library of plugins.

Installation:

First we need to make sure Java and the correct version of xulrunner are installed on Ubuntu. Here we will use the open source version of Java, but the sun-java6-jre version also works.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre xulrunner

Next, download the standalone Linux version of Aptana Studio from www.aptana.com and extract the zip file somewhere in your home directory.

In order for Aptana to run correctly we must set the MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME variable to point to the correct version of xulrunner. To do this we need to create a start script in the aptana directory. Using your favorite text editor, create a file in the aptana folder called runAptana.sh and insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/xulrunner"
/path/to/aptana/AptanaStudio

Make sure the /path/to/aptana corresponds to the location of the aptana directory in your home directory.

Remember to make the script executable

chmod +x runAptana.sh

Now simply run ./runAptana.sh and enjoy the Web 2.0 IDE goodness.