I didn’t see this coming. Aptana (a JavaScript / Adobe AIR / Ruby on Rails / but mostly Javascript IDE based on Eclipse) supports script debugging from Internet Explorer. This is fantastic news; Microsoft has been giving Javascript debugging for Internet Explorer a half-hearted nod for too long. Unfortunately, only the Professional version offers this, which means more $$.

I’m not sure how Aptana is going to compare with Visual Studio 2008 for this -- no doubt VS 2008 will do Silverlight and ASP.NET integration a lot better -- but Aptana as a Javascript IDE is actually really very nice for what little I’ve seen of it, and I think they’ll give Visual Studio 2008, despite VS2008’s serious improvements in JS support, a run for its money.

I hope Microsoft folks are seriously looking at Aptana’s features to see how they can improve the Visual Studio IDE. Some things I like in Aptana over VS:

- Actually turning ON and USING the built-in feature to download community SDKs and prefab projects
- Browser support and DOM versioning described directly in the code completion menus for each Javascript interface
- Respect for, use of, and support for very popular open source APIs such as Prototype.
- SVN support (hello?)
- Warning flags in the margins (not just with red squiggly underlines)
- JSON support (full editor in Pro version)

Obviously I think ultimately VS 2008 (*not* 2005) brings more to the table with regard to being a Javascript IDE but so far *only* for managing home-grown Javascript libs and the ASP.NET AJAX Library, and for integrating with ASP.NET.