Wow! REAL Studio Web Edition!

Posted by paul on Aug 31, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

I don’t think many people saw this coming. With all that REAL has been working on lately (Cocoa, LLVM), it hardly seems like they’ve had enough time to also roll out a new product. But today, REAL Software announced REAL Studio Web Edition (RSW), a new product that will be shipping sometime in the fall.

This product looks really cool and to me is way more important than Cocoa support. For web development work, I’ve resigned myself to using ASP.NET. It’s not perfect (requiring IIS is a major stinker) and Microsoft has turned it into something complex (as they tend to do), but I still prefer it over PHP, Java, Ruby and other web-based languages and frameworks that I’ve tried.

I’ve reviewed the demo video, but there wasn’t much information there. But Bob Keeney was lucky enough to get an early look at the product and posted a video walk-through of RWS at his site so be sure to check it out for more information.

REAL has said that an alpha/beta will be available to us beta testers soon and I can’t wait (REAL, my birthday is Thursday — I’d love a nice RWS Alpha present!). The sooner I’m able to dump Visual Studio for good, the happier I’ll be.

One slight hitch is that apparently, RWS needs FastCGI on the server in order to communicate with the compiled code. I guess I need to start looking around for hosts that allow FastCGI to be enabled. Or perhaps I just need to finally look into virtual server hosting or perhaps MacMiniColo, which I’ve heard good things about.