Several months back I switched from using Notepad++ to Eclipse-based Aptana Studio to develop an Adobe AIR desktop client for work & have been pretty happy with Aptana other than for the huge amount of memory it gobbles up. Late last week the Adobe AIR Development Plug-In for Aptana came out of beta & is great news for anyone developing HTML/JavaScript-based AIR apps (as opposed to Flash/Flex-based).

One of the drawbacks in developing HTML/JavaScript-based Adobe AIR applications is the lack of debugging tools. It doesn’t help that AIR’s error exception will often output an “undefined at undefined” error message in the system console when a JS error occurs, without any stack trace, leaving you to guess where it actually occurred. This is fine for a small application, but when you have tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code you’ll often be left banging your head on the desk trying to trace down the error in the code.

This screencast from Aptana better illustrates the new features. Be sure to check it out if you’re using Aptana Studio and/or were looking to give it a try!

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