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.

Bothered with pesky PHP bugs? Grab a can of MacGDBp and exterminate those bugs FAST!

18 year-old Beantown open source whiz Robert Sesek has announced that he'll be releasing his MacGDBp project bright and early on Tuesday, June 17 at his Blue Static website.

MacGDBp builds on the open source Xdebug application to provide a native Cocoa Leopard-only app for remote debugging of PHP scripts. Connect to your running PHP script and you can do instruction stepping to see how your script is working. You can set breakpoints, view the current function call stack, and look at all local variable values.

Robert noted that MacGDBp is designed to be very familiar to anyone who has spent time using the Xcode debugger. He's releasing the app under the GNU GPL version 2, which (duh) means it is available at no cost.

If you do any work with PHP (hey, I'm constantly customizing WordPress myself), MacGDBp may be your new best friend. Be sure to set an iCal alarm for Tuesday morning and get your copy of MacGDBp.

Thank you, Robert, for telling us about your app!

Updated to add correct date

Just yesterday, we told you about the new GUI version of Transmission. For those who prefer remote control, there's also a web UI for the Transmission daemon, called (cleverly enough) Clutch, just updated to version 0.2. Clutch is an easy way to manage your BitTorrent downloads from anywhere you can access the internet.

Clutch is a front-end for the Transmission torrent engine; it doesn't require the GUI version of Transmission, and the two tools don't show each others' download results. but if you use both you may see download results from one tool in the other's list, say our commenters. Clutch uses the web server that's built into Mac OS X, along with AJAX and PHP for the web interface. The app is a self-contained package that has all of the software needed to run the web interface; just open, set a few preferences, and then -- boom -- you're done!

If you do not have a static IP address, or use a dynamic DNS service (such as DynDNS), then Clutch will give you a link to your current external IP address, so you can find and connect to your computer over the internet. You might ask "Why would I want to do that?" The answer is time management: BitTorrent downloads can take a while, much too long for you to wait around, and with this tool you can manage your downloads from work, school, or at the local Starbucks. Using this software means that you will have to open a port in your firewall (the default port is 9091, however, you may set it to use any inactive port above 1024 that you wish). Clutch 0.2 is open source and is available as a free download from the Clutch website.

One of the good things about the "very sweet solution" of iPhone development is that you don't need any special tools or too much knowhow to create neat applications-- if you know a little HTML, a little PHP, and have access to a text editor, you can come up with some pretty cool stuff. This tutorial from IBM's DeveloperWorks is about as simple as it gets, and yet it shows you how you can use your iPhone as a remote for iTunes, Keynote, or any other AppleScript-able applications on your Mac, with no jailbreakin' necessary.

Of course, as he mentions at the end, Telekinesis did most of this stuff early on, so if you've got something standard that you want to do (like control iTunes), you don't need to write the code yourself any more. But combine the tutorial with any other custom AppleScripts you've written (or might write), and a lot of possibilities open up in terms of what you can do with your computer, straight from your iPhone.

[ via MacBytes ]

SiliconUser takes a short look at ye olde Hypercard technology, Apple's precursor to the concepts that eventually became HTML and the World Wide Web. The project was originally created in 1985 as an easier way to create programs on the Macintosh-- it consisted of a "cards and stacks" metaphor, as in you created one card that linked to another card in the stack, and so on. Early Hypercard stacks just worked as organized information databases, but eventually Hypercard ended up doing more and more-- cards could work as applications in themselves, and the links between them served as a precursor to hyperlinks and what we know as the Internet today. Personally, I only used Hypercard very minimally, and it's hard for me to imagine as much functionality coming out of Hypercard as we've got with CSS, HTML, and PHP today. But Hypercard faithful (of which the numbers seem to be not quite known), held onto the application for a long time.

Hypercard's downfall came arguably not because it failed to stand up to new concepts, but because Apple, in a blunder, passed the program away to Claris, who tried to sell it rather than include it free in Macs. By the time Apple took it back, in 1993, the momentum was lost, and after a short period with Apple's Quicktime division, Hypercard was discontinued in 2004. Previous to that, Hypercard 3.0 was shown at WWDC 1996 (including the ability to display Hypercard stacks in a web browser, which might have been the key to keeping Hypercard alive), but that release never came. There are a few traces of Hypercard left on Apple's site, but as a technology, it's as dead as dead gets.

Thanks, Thomas!

You'd be forgiven for thinking, especially reading our coverage and stories elsewhere, that the only new product to come out of Apple, Inc. in the past two weeks was some sort of bizarre chimera mutant love child of an iPod and a cellphone. Not true! Hardworking and underappreciated subsidiary FileMaker has lovingly crafted version 9 of its namesake desktop database, to the joy and glee of DB geeks near and far.

Version 9 continues the trend of power-user upgrades for FileMaker, adding dramatically improved SQL integration with MSSQL, MySQL and, Oracle back ends; there's also a code-free PHP setup tool in FileMaker Server for database-powered web pages at an instant. More than 30 new features in total are gracing the FM website, so by all means check it out. Upgrades start at $179 for FileMaker Pro.

Realmac Software today has released the much-anticipated new version of RapidWeaver, their powerful WYSIWYG software that does a great job of filling the gap between iWeb and Dreamweaver. This new v3.6 ushers in a significant list of new features, such as:

• Themes Styles - no more digging in HTML and CSS to customize your theme (unless you really want to)
• 6 completely new themes
• Snippets - manage chunks of frequently used code instead of copy/pasting or constantly re-typing
• New Flash Slideshow - completely rewritten and can now pull images from a Flickr feed
• Improved blog, including tags and inline comment support
• Easy creation of Lists
• Detailed Publishing
• And much, much more

Also, due to RapidWeaver's "skyrocketing" popularity, RealMac Software introduced a redesigned website today that includes a full-featured add-ons section where users can browse themes, plug-ins and code snippets, which of course also means 3rd parties nowhave one central RapidWeaver community where the can highlight their products.

With everything involved, I can completely understand Realmac Software's decision to make v3.6 a paid upgrade - current users (including MacHeist owners) can purchase a v3.6 license for $25, while a full license costs $49. A demo is of course available, so head over to the shiny new Realmac Software site to see everything RapidWeaver has to offer.

If Dreamweaver is a bit overkill for some web work on your desk, Taco HTML might just be the editor for you. It's a small yet feature-packed web editor with tag coloring, HTML preview, syntax checking, code snippets and more. It's my favorite editor for HTML pages or tweaking a WordPress PHP page file or two.

As far as I can tell, Taco HTML is provided free, and is a Universal Binary. Check it out if you read this post in less time than it takes Dreamweaver to start up.

Headdress is a nifty little application that makes turning on and off PHP very easy, but that's not all. It also takes care of modifying the Apache config files, so your little old Mac can serve up a number of websites (locally) without you having to worry about nesting files or anything like that.

Headdress will setup 2 sites before you have to register for $14.95.

[via What Do I Know Enjoying]

I'm really glad to see all this innovation in WYSIWYG web editing software, and from my experience, Sandvox from Karelia Software is poised to lead the pack. Yes, I've been going on about how excited I am about the iWeb 1.1 update, but after playing with Sandvox's beta editions, I'm going to give this official 1.0 release a good run-through, as it offers quite a bit of power and some nice tricks that other products like RapidWeaver and iWeb can't claim.

The feature that impresses me the most about Sandvox is their innovative "Pagelets" feature. Pagelets are small chunks of rich content that you can simply drag and drop around your site's theme. Don't like where your blogroll is? Just drag its pagelet somewhere else. Pagelets in the pro version can also allow you to insert your own HTML and even PHP code into any portion of your site or sidebar. Speaking of site themes: Sandvox's are stellar, and a bit more creative than iWeb's. Sandvox comes with two dozen themes, with more available.

Sandvox also does a lot of the, dare I say, 'standard' WYSIWYG web design-ish stuff that I've come to expect on the Apple platform. You can drag your audio podcasts into a Sandvox site and get them submitted to the iTMS, as well as drag images from iPhoto, etc.

Overall, despite lightning striking twice for Karelia Software, Sandvox looks like a solid product that presents a strong array of features for the WYSIWYG designer that demands a little more from their web design app.

I found another one of those 'switcher blogs' and I thought it might make an interesting read for both Mac newbies and power users. I honestly can't find any information on the author, but My Journey to Macintosh provides up some interesting switcher experiences, such as loading up Firefox just because that's what the author used on Windows, then discovering that other browsers like Camino offer a far more Mac OS X-like experience, in part because Camino isn't butt-ugly and it uses the Keychain.

One thing I like about this blog is that the author seems to be a power user, of sorts; while some posts are about discovering the wonders of working with PDFs on a Mac without the need  for Adobe's (fat, bloated, clunky, slow and horrible) Reader, another post laments some hangups in getting PHP and MySQL working. In other words: there's something for everyone!

There isn't a virtual library of posts yet, but I thought it might be an interesting switcher blog to watch because of both the variety of topics the author has touched on so far, and an About section that reads: "Microsoft Windows user since Windows 3.0 moves to a Mac and Mac OS/X Tiger. Watch the process, good and bad :)." See? Fair and balanced, too. Enjoy.

One of the very first cool things I learned about the guts of OS X was the existence of Apache, an industrial-strength web server, built in to the OS. O'Reilly has a nice piece on getting started with Apache, so start there if you're new to web serving on your Mac. Imagine hosting your own pages for your own home intranet. Now take that one step further, and imagine dynamic pages, ones capable of accessing data from the web or your machine, on your home network (or using DynDNS, anywhere).

I'm going to point out a few resources for getting started using Apache and PHP on your Mac. You'll find the combination powerful, and getting up to speed is relatively simple. There's some programming involved, so if you're scared of that sort of thing, check out How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. Granted, you'll be learning Python, but guess what? You can use Python on your Mac as well. Python goes beyond  web programming, and is a great language to get familiar with. If you want to learn PHP, check out Webmonkey's PHP section, or W3 School's PHP intro.

Apple has a page on getting PHP working on your Mac. It's a nice article too, with a step-by-step building of a page to view your iTunes library, complete with plenty of XML goodness as well. The problem here is the version of PHP that comes with your Mac is generally a version behind the current release. While PHP 4.3 was nice, version 5 adds some great stuff. The version of Apache shipping with your Mac probably isn't the latest rev of that either, so check out phpmac's tutorial on installing Apache 2.20 and PHP 5.1.2. It's only for OS X version 10.4.4, but it'll still work with 10.4.5 (no warranty expressed or implied, back up your data, etc.).

Once you have more current versions up and running, try out some of those programming resources, and try building apps. I think you'll find while Apache keeps your Mac acting like a great web page server, PHP can turn your private pages into real network apps. What's really great about setting up PHP on your Mac isn't just a home network, but being able to build and test web apps too, all from the comfort of your favorite OS.

Komodo, a powerful IDE for various scripting languages and the like, has been released for OS X by ActiveState.

Any time a company releases an IDE for OS X I do a little dance on the inside because it means that people are noticing the developer community that OS X has built up around it. More developers means more software for the Mac and that can't be a bad thing.