To web developers, scripting is the glue that connects web pages and back-end systems. For example, PHP is a very popular scripting environment that has been used to write web apps like WordPress and phpBB. For those of you who use PHP, you know that it is a dynamic, weakly-typed hypertext preprocessor. In other words, it's a scripting language that is embedded in the HTML code that makes up a web page.

Inspiring Applications, Inc. hopes to catch the imagination of web developers with Yuma, their new strongly-typed, object-oriented scripting tool that is being released today. Rather than the confusing syntax of PHP, Yuma uses a simple REALBasic-like syntax. It is natively compiled to machine code on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows for high speed.

Yuma Development Server for Mac OS X is available as a free download, complete with example code, a full developer reference, language definition files for BBEdit, TextMate and Text Wrangler, and more. When you're ready to deploy your Yuma web app, you can purchase and install Yuma Enterprise Server ($149). It's a command-line app and may be set up as a daemon.

To run either Yuma Development or Enterprise Server on Mac OS X, you need to be running OS X 10.3 or later on a G4, G5, or Intel-based Mac with at least 1 GB of RAM.

Thanks to Brad for the tip.

Mono is an interesting Open Source Project, sponsored by Novell, that "provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix." The most recent version, 1.2.3, adds support for a Visual Basic 8.0 compiler meaning that Visual Basic applications can now be run on the Mac. The Mono project has an active Mac community already, and if you're looking to investigate you might start with this Xcode tutorial. Now, of course, the question of whether it's a good thing that it is easy to compile a VB application for the Mac is something else entirely. Nonetheless, Mono now seems to represent an inexpensive alternative to REALbasic for writing cross-platform applications.

[Via MacNN]

It's time again for our yearly REALbasic post. REAL Software has released the 2007 edition of their cross-platform development language. This edition brings improved support for building Universal Binaries as well improved "support for MySQL, PostreSQL and ODBC compliant databases" and QuickTime. Sometimes I think REALbasic may make it too easy to write software considering some of the stuff out there, but I'm sure this will be good news to some of you.

REALbasic comes in two versions, standard for $99 and pro for $500 (upgrades are $50 and $250 respectively).

[Via Infinite Loop]

REAL Software has just announced the availability of REALbasic 2006, the newest version of their cross platform development environment.

This new version includes support for mouse drag events, more datatypes, structures, numerous stability enhancements, and much more. REALbasic standard edition costs $99 while the pro edition is available at an intro price of $399.95 (usually $499.95).