Witango Studio 6, the long awaited update to the current version (5.5) is finally in beta. Macintosh users are getting to play with it right now and us Windows users are patiently waiting our turn. What has changed? Everything from the ground up, according to the development team. This time they built the whole development studio from the ground up using Java. As soon as I get a chance to play with it I’ll report on what is new.

According to customer service, here is a peek at what is coming down the pike:

New Witango Studio that will run on any platform (OS X, Windows, Linux, etc)
Web Call actions with support for POST, GET, PUT, DELETE and HEAD.
Actions for easy sending, receiving emails and managing mailboxes (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4)
Backup Mail servers can now be used
Filesystem actions for List, Create and Delete directories.
All file actions can now used FTP
Insert and Search builders have been updated and modernised.
Heaps of interface improvements in the Studio
Transactions can be nested with different datasources
Admin functions for managing the datasource pool and user variable pool
Perl integration to the SCRIPT action and tag
Cron jobs should allow https requests
@ISFLOAT
@ISINT
@ISALPHANUMERIC
@SWITCH / @CASE
@ARRAYTOCSV and @CSVTOARRAY
@SERIALIZE
@UNSERIALIZE

There has also been some work done under the hood to improve stability and as preparation for a 64-bit release of the server.

Windows (and linux) Dev Studio 6.0 beta will be available early June. An alpha of the server will be available mid June or so.

Never heard of Witango? The beauty of Witango is its highly visual approach to programming. Phil Wade and his team down in Australia have worked hard to ensure that anyone can build a web application that integrates to a database (search, insert, update, and delete records), manages email, injests web services, and handles data easily and efficiently - the most basic requirements of a web application in today’s market. The results of a highly structured GUI for coding are rapid development cycles and a short learning curve. I can pick up almost anyone’s Witango code and, due to the inherent structure laid down by the development studio, know what is going on in minutes. The only major downside is a proprietary server (which is not cheap) and only a few truly great professional hosts (check out Robert @ Tronics).