Aptana Studio is the IDE that i have been using for development, for quite some time now . I like the various features it provides to ease the development of web applications . And since its Eclipse under the hood, its completely free and open source, and has plugins for all major web development technologies like PHP, Ruby on Rails,Adobe AIR etc.

Python support is provided by the Aptana PyDev plugin, which was earlier a part of their Pro version,but which they have now released as free and open source

Detailed instructions for setting up and using Aptana PyDev are given at http://pydev.org/manual.html,and here i have summarized the installation steps involved.

1) Go to Help->Install New Software

2) Click on Add, to add the update site

3) Now enter any Name for the update site,say PyDev,and in Location enter,http://pydev.org/updates and press OK.

4) Then select what you want to install and click Finish.

After installation is over, you will have to specify the location of the python interpreter on your system. So, to do that :

1) Go to Window -> Preferences.

2) Under PyDev select Interpreter-Python

3) You can press Auto Config to make Aptana automatically detect the python interpreter on your system and add it, but if that fails for some reason , no worries, just click on New,enter a name and Browse to the location on your file system where it is installed. Then press OK on the select interpreter screen and OK again on the Preferences screen

Thats it, you should now have full Python support in Aptana Studio…Happy Hacking