Since I initiating work on the Bad Dogs project (as of yesterday, that is), I have begun to play around a bit more with Aptana Cloud. I have to say, I am impressed. It's hard to imagine that it could be much easier to work with and manage my site.
I won't detail all the Cloud features and offerings (the Aptana site does that just fine!) but I thought it might be helpful to call some out below and, for a few of the features noted below, I'll dedicate a post to them.
- Everything for your site can be managed from the My Aptana page: account billing and payments, management of server services, repository, team access, etc. Below is a screen shot of the Overview tab in the "My Cloud" UI.
- When you deploy a project (site) to the Cloud, three versions of your site (private, staging, and public) are created for you. I LOVE having a staging site all setup for me!! I can't stress enough, how often the lack of a staging site has been a thorn in my side.
- FTP is built into Aptana Studio and is especially well-built for connecting to your Cloud sites. From the Project View in Eclipse/Aptana Studio, you can select whether or not you want to upload to your staging or public site. Pretty sweet!
- You also get an SVN repository for your site. I set mine up today with a few clicks (I am using Subversive 0.75 as my SVN plugin in Eclipse).
Aptana has done a very nice job of integrating their Cloud service into Aptana Studio. While I have not yet used a site on the Cloud that was popular and/or in need of significant resources, I am preparing to launch a large-scale PHP project to the Cloud. Very excited to see how it plays out and will keep a running tally as I go.
Up Next: Deploying a Project
