Tribeworks, the folks behind the iShell application authoring product, and Artful — which specializes in application development and automation, and strategic hosting solutions — have teamed up to produce Webkool, an open source application server.
When released later this year, Webkool will be the most robust open source application server available, Marcel Siegle, director of marketing and communications at Tribeworks told MacCentral. And it will run on Mac OS X.
“Due to its truly object oriented architecture, Webkool is extremely memory efficient, lightning fast and has the coolest debugging environment, allowing remote debugging,” Siegle said. “Webkool will also allow seamless multi-platform development and deployment.”
It’s based on Key4 (the programming and description language that was developed by Tribeworks and used to construct iShell), XHTML and SQL. (The next major release of iShell will use Key4). Siegle said that Webkool’s flexible architecture will allow multi-platform development of high-performance Internet applications on systems including Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows, running on servers such as Apache, IIS and Zeus, and with server databases such as MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server.
Webkool has all the advantages of class and object programming and will adapt to each stage in the development of applications, said Duncan Kennedy, Tribeworks President. In fact, Artful immediately started using Webkool for high-traffic sites such as Web In Love from the NRJ group, he added. Tribeworks plans to incorporate Webkool into its Enterprise software products.
Webkool source code will be freely available in October and will allow for the exchange of code improvements and corrections without hindering commercial service. Artful and Tribeworks are distributing the code for the tools under the “GNU General Public License” (GPL) and the software library source codes under the “GNU Lesser General Public License” (LGPL). Developers interested in Webkool can receive more information and register at the product Web site.