Aptana has announced the immediate availability of Java support in its application hosting and life-cycle management service, Aptana Cloud Connect. Aptana Cloud Connect is architected to integrate with both cloud hosting providers and Aptana Studio, the open source web development IDE that also plugs into Eclipse. By integrating directly with Eclipse via Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud Connect delivers efficiency for authoring, deploying and managing Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and other types of web applications running in cloud data centers.

Today, millions of developers world-wide use Eclipse for Java development and many have added Aptana Studio's AJAX, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development tools to their Eclipse installations. Now Java developers who add Aptana Studio version 1.2.5 to their Eclipse installations can also provision scalable Java app servers in the cloud, deploy applications, and begin working with remote files, databases, server logs and more through Aptana Studio's editors and views. Aptana Cloud Connect and Aptana Studio also support Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python and Jaxer, an AJAX server based on Mozilla Firefox.

This initial release of Java support via Aptana Cloud Connect focuses on web applications using Java Servlets, Java Servlet Pages (JSP), Java Server Faces (JSF), The Spring Framework for Java, and related technologies. Optimized configurations of Apache Tomcat, the ubiquitous open source Servlet engine, and MySQL come installed by default.

"Cloud computing is already saving organizations of all sizes lots of time and money. Today's cloud computing services let organizations purchase scalable CPU cycles as they need them rather than having to procure, set up and manage whole servers. Aptana Cloud Connect lets you do that too, but goes much further to bring extreme efficiency to the whole application lifecycle", said Paul Colton, CEO and founder of Aptana. "Click a button and Aptana Cloud Connect automatically provisions cloud computing resources, installs and configures application environments with ready to use databases, sets up source control services, manages access credential for the whole development team, and wires it all into Aptana Studio for the ultimate in development and deployment ease. And if you want to scale, just move a slider to increase the memory, storage, and CPU capacity in seconds.”

Citing how the deep integration of hosted services with the desktop development productivity of Aptana Studio simplifies both using cloud services directly or using cloud services with web-based tools, software architect Brandon Corbin recently blogged "Aptana Cloud knocked my socks off! I started playing with RightScale and Amazon EC2, and while it was cool to see it work, the amount of time and brainpower required to do everything was simply too much. Then I found Aptana Cloud -- an absolutely amazing service."

Anyone can get started by trying out the Aptana Cloud Connect service for free.  See http://www.aptana.com/cloud. Pricing starts at a mere $20 USD per month.