nWire and Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio is one of the most popular tools for web development. It is Eclipse based and includes support for PHP. Many developers ask: Does nWire support Aptana? Well, I'm afraid the answer just got a bit more complex.
To understand the answer, one needs to be familiar with the state of PHP in Eclipse. Eclipse is an open source community. The Eclipse Platform houses many projects under its' roof. It endorses the development of external plugins and tools, some open source and some proprietary. As an example, Java development is supported by a very strong project called JDT (Java Development Tools). It is one of the first projects and a lot of person years were invested in it.
PHP development is supported by PDT (PHP Development Tools). However, unlike in the Java case, high quality PHP development tools arrived late to the Eclipse party. This opened the door for a number of PHP plugins which were developed outside the Eclipse foundation over the years. Once PDT proved to be a quality contender, most of these projects were abandoned. nWire for PHP was developed for PDT 2.1 and above with support from the PDT team. Thus, it requires the use of the official Eclipse PHP support, which is PDT.
Aptana Studio is an open source IDE based on Eclipse. It borrows some plugins from Eclipse and adds some of its' own. Version 1 of Aptana did not include PDT, but rather a different plugin known as Aptana PHP. In version 2, Aptana Studio moved to PDT, abandoning the previously developed PHP support (see the Aptana Studio 2 release notes). Users of Aptana Studio 2, which is based on PDT, can use nWire with Aptana Studio.
A couple of weeks ago, a beta version of Aptana Studio 3 was released. In this version, PDT is no longer a part of the distribution and, instead, there's a newly developed PHP editor (see the release notes). This means that the new release is incompatible with nWire for PHP, which requires PDT. Users of Aptana Studio 3 cannot use nWire at the moment.
Is this the final verdict? Probably not. Users of Aptana might still be able to use nWire in the future. It should be possible to add PDT to Aptana Studio 3 and use it instead of the Aptana developed PHP support. This will re-enable nWire. However, at the time of this writing, early beta users are reporting issues with the installation of PDT with Aptana. We hope these issues are resolved before the final release.
Finally, we are considering support for Aptana PHP (and perhaps even Ruby) in future nWire releases. If this is something which you'd be interested to see, please chime in and vote in our poll.