I use Aptana for RoR development.  Not because it’s a good Ruby or Rails IDE, but because I do so much Java at my paying job and switching between Java development on Eclipse to RoR development on Aptana is a breeze.  Today, I was checking out Aptana’s website for updates when I noticed that they now have a product called Aptana Cloud.

Aptana Cloud appears to be a integrated deployment/hosting platform for Aptana.  You can write applications in PHP, Jaxer (Aptana’s AJAX framework), and Ruby on Rails (coming soon), and deploy them to a cloud with a push of a button.  Right now, it deploys to Joyent’s Cloud, but it appears that the intention is to be provider agnostic, which would be key for adoption.

I’m very interested in trying this out, though I’m going to wait until RoR support is ready.  Hopefully, this will lead to some standards to cloud computing, making it easier to switch from one provider to another.  No doubt this is where lightweight development frameworks should be going (looking at you Appcelerator).