Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Aptana Studio disables internet, "known issue"

This may be one of the most ridiculous problems I've ever had with a piece of software. I tried to use Aptana Studio to some Rails development, but when I tried to install the Rails plugin, it would block my network adapter from doing anything. Here's the mail I sent:
If I attempt to install the Radrails plugin from within Aptana Studio, I lose all internet connectivity instantly, including the ability to ping or resolve a DNS entry. Naturally, this interrupts the download also, and prevents me from doing anything until I forcibly close Aptana, at which point, I regain full connectivity.

So Aptana replied:

Hi Blake,

This is a known issue with the Aptana update site for some users. Try the workarounds for manual installation described on this page:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/

Hope this helps,
Michelle Petersen
Aptana, Inc.

So not only is it ridiculous, but it's a known issue. Aptana currently does not have a product, but they shipped something anyways. If you have software that breaks other functional parts of a user's machine, that's unacceptable.

I will never use any of their other products and I can't recommend any of them to anyone.

never break other parts of a user's machine without warning (some exceptions to this would be a BitTorrent client that may peg your network traffic, or a defragger that blocks hard disk access)

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ted,

We apologize for the difficulties you had installing RadRails and Aptana Studio. Unfortunately, the Eclipse update mechanism (which we depend upon), generates a good deal of network traffic and for a small number of users with specific network cards it can generate the problem you saw.

If people run into this issue, they usually report good success by using the workaround here:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/

We have had some luck with trying newer ways of delivering smaller updates to users to sidestep the issue, and we hope to have a resolution for that soon. We also hope to deliver an all-in-one installer of both Studio + Rails.

In the meantime, if there is anything else we can do to help, please let us know.

By the way, I spent some time reading your other blog posts about interfaces. I know Eclipse saddles us with some interesting UI conventions, but there are a number of initiatives to "clean up" the Eclipse UI. It'd be interesting to see a post on what Eclipse could do better and maybe IDEs in general.

Best,
Ingo

Blake Householder said...

Actually, I posted that article.

While I sympathize with you on the issue of Eclipse's update mechanism causing the problem, that's not a very good excuse for not contributing a patch. Especially since it breaks your product and hurts your users.

Also, I searched briefly and could not find the workaround solution that was later emailed to me. It needs to be much easier to find if you want users to be satisfied.

And I'm not sure what other posts you read since at the time of your commenting, it was the only one on the blog.

Unknown said...

Hi Blake,

I apologize. I saw both you and Ted as contributors in one of the commenting screens, and mistyped.

You are completely correct about submitting a patch back to Eclipse. We are working on one, and we will submit one when we arrive at a good solution.

In the meantime, your suggestion is helpful that we need to make the workaround much easier to find. We'll correct that.

Regarding your other posts, I had followed the link to one of your other blogs which (I hope) were written by you.

Thanks again,
Ingo

Anonymous said...

Aptana has worked for me on my computer for about a year and I'm using several other extensions as well but when I tried to update to the latest version it kills my internet as you describe.

If it worked with earlier versions - I've updated from 1.0 to 1.1 from within Eclipse - but the 1.1.1 update kills my internet...

Blake Householder said...

ingo:
I appreciate your candidness, but I'm sure you can understand my apprehension about using Aptana products when they have issues like this. It's great to hear that you're working on them though.

pelle:
Did you try the workaround they gave?

Anonymous said...

As of today (12/08/2008), the problem is still not solved. I'm trying to update Aptana plugin 1.2.1.020234 for Elipse 3.4, and it blocks all my connections, and even never finishes itself.

Chris Bloom said...

Ditto here - latest update completely kills all tcp/ip traffic while it runs. If I cancel the update or quit Aptana all traffic flows. I also seem to be able to regain connectivity if I manually release and renew my IP address, but this only works for a few seconds at best until all traffic is again blocked. Even if the problem is with certain network cards, the proper solution would be to optimize the network traffic that Eclipse generates.