Aptana

Aptana, Inc. was established in 2005 by Paul Colton and was positioned as a provider of open-source tools for web application development. The company's core offering was Aptana Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) built on the Eclipse platform, designed for web developers working with languages like JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Over its history, the company secured approximately $20.3 million in funding from investors including Accel and Rembrandt Partners.

The company's primary product, Aptana Studio, provided a comprehensive environment for building and debugging web applications. It offered features such as code assistance, document object model (DOM) and CSS outlining, and integrated documentation. Through additional plugins, its capabilities could be extended to support frameworks and technologies like Ruby on Rails, Python, and Adobe AIR. Initially, Aptana operated on a dual-license model, offering a free, open-source Community Edition and a paid-for Pro Edition; eventually, the features of the Pro version were merged into the free Community Edition. Beyond the IDE, Aptana's product suite included Aptana Jaxer, an open-source Ajax web server based on the Mozilla Gecko engine, and Aptana Cloud Connect, a web hosting and application management service.

The business catered to a broad market of web developers, from individual coders to organizations that utilized scripting languages for web 2.0 and Ajax application development. The open-source nature of its primary tool, Aptana Studio, which was downloaded over 4 million times, suggests a business model focused on building a large user base, with potential revenue streams from professional editions, cloud services, and enterprise support. A significant milestone in the company's journey occurred on January 7, 2011, when it was acquired by Appcelerator, Inc., a mobile technology company known for its Titanium SDK for cross-platform mobile development. The acquisition was a strategic move for Appcelerator to integrate a powerful IDE into its own offerings, aiming to provide a seamless development experience from coding to deployment. Following the acquisition, the Aptana team was integrated into Appcelerator, with plans to continue the development of Aptana Studio and integrate it with the Titanium mobile framework. While Axway later acquired Appcelerator and no longer actively maintains the Aptana repository, the open-source code remains publicly available on GitHub.

Keywords:Aptana, Aptana Studio, web development IDE, open source, Paul Colton, Appcelerator, Eclipse plugin, JavaScript IDE, PHP IDE, Ruby on Rails IDE, Python IDE, web application development, Aptana Cloud, Aptana Jaxer, cross-platform development, Ajax development, code assist, web developer tools, HTML editor, CSS editor