Inspiring Applications has released Yuma, a development tool that allows BASIC programmers to design web software for any server platform. Yuma allows users to build web sites with an object-oriented language similar to VB.net and REALbasic, resulting in faster and more efficient development. It supports Apache for web serving and features type-checking, classes and class interfaces, modules and other development-savvy tools. The Yuma Enterprise Server runs on Mac OS X 10.3 and higher, requiring 1GB RAM and a 1GHz G4-, G5- or Intel-based Mac. Windows and Linux are also supported.

The new development tool also requires a web server that supports an external-module protocol called FastCGI. Yuma Enterprise Server costs $150 per server license, while the Yuma Development Server is free and includes a built-in web server.

Yuma, an HTML pre-processor, allows users to build web applications by embedding executable Yuma code in HTML documents. Its server compiles the code on-the-fly.

"Unlike most other web development solutions, Yuma pages are automatically compiled all the way to machine code, resulting in very fast performance even in computation-intensive applications," Inspiring Applications president Brad Weber said.

Yuma benchmarks on a prime-number algorithm showed it to be over six times faster than PHP, and nearly 23 times faster than JavaScript.