Google should buy Aptana

I guess I'm slow, cause today was the first time I heard of Aptana, its IDE, and the deliciously tempting Jaxer AJAX server, which lets you "write entire applications or presentation layers in Ajax", with "full DOM and JavaScript on the server", "seamless communication between browser and server", "database, file and socket access from JavaScript", as well as "share[d] validation code on the brower and server", all using "open-source, standards[and ...] the APIs you already know". "If you know JavaScript and HTML, you can already build Jaxer applications."

This set me off on quite the tangent, downloading Jaxer (as well as Studio), and then looking at the code examples, and how Dion Almaer (who is both on the Google Gears team and on the Aptana Advisory Board) have integrated Jaxer with Google Gears, and also how there is an MVC drive going on.  (Here's another take on (client-side) JavaScript MVC.)

Aptana is also working on a cloud solution for PHP/Jaxer/(and soon) Ruby on Rails - it certainly sounds interesting, but I'm not going to attempt to pretend I grok the underlying architecture, compared to something like the Google App Engine.

Finally, the Aptana Advisory Board reads like a Who's Who on JavaScript and Ajax frameworks.

Google should buy these guys.  It would fill both an IDE and a language-hole, and it'd be some serious competition for Microsoft's Live Mesh, Silverlight and DLR strategy.