Aptana Cloud has now been announced. This is exciting news and a step closer to server-side Javascript world domination. You don’t have to use Javascript, as the platform offers several engines, but from my perspective, the most exciting thing is the inclusion of Jaxer. So it should be easy to deploy server-side Javascript to a completely scaleable platform.

As for the more headline feature, it is a general cloud play. It will target the existing Amazon/Google/Joyent/others clouds (a “designed to go meta” as Dion puts it) rather than being a YAC (yet another cloud). My personal experience with the much-hyped Amazon EC2 has been nothing but pain, pain, pain. It might be fine for your run-of-the-mill Web 2.0 startup, but casual use? Forget it. Give me bog-standard ssh any day. If Aptana can solve that problem, and I have no idea if they can, but if they can, I’m sold. Key to the strategy will be integration with the Aptana IDE. That said, I find the Heroku idea of Cloudies (cloud IDEs) fascinating, so it would be nice if a product like this also offered some rudimentary cloud editing support in the future. (Enough to at least fix a critical bug from the comfort of an internet cafe.)

Kevin Hakman got in contact with me after the Javascript Grid article and kindly offered to let me review the beta, which is still on the cards, so I’ll let you know how it goes once I get access. I’ll also be interested to see how much more expensive it is to hit a Jaxer script versus a PHP script.