Adobe's new cross-operating system runtime opens up much more possibilities to both developers and everyday computer users. It allows developers to create new web applications using HTML, XML, Javascript and Flex. What's more they aren't limited to using Adobe's library, but can create, share and use their own to create specific web applications.

For users, it gives access to new and exciting rich internet applications (RIA) which can be run straight from their desktop. These use very little memory, are usually quick to launch and execute and have very smooth animations. A quick visit to the Adobe Showcase Gallery and you get an idea of the sort of applications that are being developed for AIR: a Google Analytics Reporting Suite, a Twitter desktop client, a movie discovery tool and much, much more. The possibilities are endless and really depend on the creativity of developers.

While I've had some errors with AIR, especially when installing new apps, I'm overall very impressed with it. Quietly but surely, we're seeing more and more exciting web applications being developed. Install AIR to be part of the web applications revolution!

Download Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) 1.1 in Softonic

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

Download PHP 5.2.5 Final in Softonic

With intelligently organized reports, a distributed architecture, and no database requirements, SmarterStats provides an enterprise-level application without the price. SmarterStats is the perfect solution for providing intuitive web site statistics.

Download SmarterStats Free Edition 3.2.2480 in Softonic

Mambo is a full-featured content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. It can be summed up by the following set of features:

• A large and healthy user and developer community
• Provides a basic level of content approval for registered users
• Online help
• Page caching mechanism to improve performance on busy sites
• Trash manager
• Advertising management (banners, etc)
• Media (images, documents) upload and management
• Content display scheduling
• Content syndication (RSS)
• Search engine friendly (SEF) URL's
• Content macro language (aka mambots)
• Advanced and separate system administation system
• Advanced package/addon/template deployment system
• Simple but powerful template system
• Hierarchical user access groups
• Basic visitor statistics
• Multiple WYSIWYG content editor support
• Simple polls
• Content voting/rating system.null

Download Mambo 4.6 RC1 in Softonic

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable opne source bulletin board package. The popular tool has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ.

Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites. It allows you to make the forums as large or small as you desire.

Major features:

• Supports popular database servers
• Unlimited forums and posts
• Multiple language interface
• Private or public forums
• Powerful search utility
• Private messaging system
• Complete customisation with templates

Download phpBB 2.0.18 in Softonic

EclipseStyle releases web developers from the shackles of using Notepad as their CSS editor forever! Now virtually any attribute of a stylesheet, or even a web page, can be updated immediately. Sure, a few stylesheet generators are out there, and they are perfectly fine, if you never want to make any changes, already know the names and values of all of the CSS attributes, and love working with a grid of 100 lists.

EclipseStyle puts other stylesheet editors to shame with its features such as a preview window, intuitive tabbed interface, and much more. It even includes an introduction to stylesheets if you are unfamiliar, as well as complete tutorials and references to the EclipseStyle interface.

EclipseStyle also features a code window for seeing what your style looks like in good old CSS code, automatic organization of your existing stylesheets, and extracting stylesheets from existing web pages. Try EclipseStyle today, and see what stylesheets can do for your website, and how easy they become with EclipseStyle!

Download EclipseStyle 1.0.11 in Softonic

Is this the new Google App that will revolutionise the way programs are made and open programming up to a wider audience?

Well, that remains to be seen but it's certainly an interesting innovation. Google App Engine allows you to build web applications on the same huge scale as most other Google applications. It's basically a fully integrated application environment that's aimed at those that want to reach millions of users in the same way as Google products such as Google Apps and Google Reader have. This is a PREVIEW RELEASE of Google App Engine. For now, account registrations are limited to the first 10,000 developers, and applications are restricted to the free account limits. On the positive side, it's totally free to get started (like all good Google products) and you'll receive 500MB of free space and enough processing power for 5 million monthly page views. However, you'll obviously need programming knowledge to get your app up and running and in addition, you'll have to be quick as testing is limited to the first 10,000 users.

This is an exciting attempt by Google to take a more determined step towards Web 2.0 than Google Gears but it remains to be seen if it can deliver on it's potential.

Download Google App Engine in Softonic

Having a website is not just a question of creating some HTML documents, uploading them to your web space and then forgetting about it. Websites require certain maintenance tasks and one of them is checking links to make sure they all work and there aren't any broken ones.

This can be a really boring job, but fortunately you can have Xenu Link Sleuth to do it for you. This simple tool grabs a root webpage and scans it thoroughly in order to test every single link and check they all work correctly. You can customize the analysis with filters and also set the number of maximum simultaneous threads, but in any case, be warned that the analysis takes quite a long time. In fact, I was surprised to see the huge amount of links contained in every website I tested the program with.

Once the analysis is finished, the program generates a plain HTML report with results that enables you to check link status on your website.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a simple yet very efficient way to check all the links on your website.

Download Xenu's Link Sleuth 1.2i in Softonic

If you've always wanted to try learning Java but have no programming skills, then Javascript Animator Express may be of interest. It allows you to create virtual animations in Java, with no need to program nor a single line of code. Sounds ambitious? It probably is although this program does a respectable job in trying.

Firstly, you will have to choose the images that you want to include in the animations and define how long you want the interval time between the transitions. Creating the animation effect is then just a case of clicking the animate button so you can preview what you've created. If you the images in sequence, you should have yourself a pretty impressive Java animation.

The page generated with the animation also contains a small control panel that enables you to slow down and change the intervals. A useful little program that makes java animations easy but would have been a lot more useful if it included options to create other Java functions.

Download JavaScript Animator Express 1.10 in Softonic

Most web editing programs these days offer tools for both scripting and designing pages. However, many code addicts are not interested in having the design element and may feel that a Design view simply gets in the way. Instead, they want a toolbox that herlps them check code and provide scripting assistance. Webocton Scriptly is aimed squarely at these people.

The application contains loads of helpful tools and we were particularly impressed with the syntax highlighting, which can check nine different file types, including HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript. As well as this, you get a MySQL assistant, a Hex viewer, and an FTP client thrown into the mix. The program is great for hardcore HTML and PHP coders, but even if your work is purely scripting-based you'll probably need a Design view from time to time, which this Scripty doesn't offer. Even if you want to preview and check a page you'll need to load an external browser, which can get annoying. Nevertheless, it's a useful program to have in your site-building armoury.

Download Webocton Scriptly 0.8.92.2 in Softonic

Webmedia Explorer is an alternative CMS engine that reads your PC hard disk and generates a website in real time taking advantage of a very powerful rendering and data fetching caching system.

It may work as your web desktop, your mediablog or a very abstract portal engine in which sections or categories are actually real folders. With it, you can do things that with other CMS are inconceivable like moving a whole data tree from one place to another.

You can have all of your data organized in folders but also marked with tags at the same time. Editing tasks are also very simple, as there is no admin interface. Webmedia Explorer uses a simple context menu that simplifies this.

You can do a lot of different things with Webmedia Explorer:

• Have a personal photo album.
• Have a personal media center with all your music and movies.
• Have a blog, be it personal or not.
• Have a bookmark collection.
• Have a web rss reader.

Webmedia Explorer is probably the easiest to install CMS as it doesn't use any general purpose database server. Furthermore, it is very easy to modify due to its object oriented three layer architecture and reduced size. So you can quickly adapt it to your own needs.

Download Webmedia Explorer 3.2.2 in Softonic

Runcms Includes most things a webmaster would expect from a cms: downloads, links, tutorials section, polls, forums, news, faq, contact form, rss feeds, file uploads, blogging via xml-rpc, & more. Possibility to manage users as groups with module/block specific access permissions, and extend functioality via 3rd party module plug-ins. Has a simple yet good themability. Easy enough to use for users, while staying simple enough to extend & customize for coders.

Download RunCMS 1.3a in Softonic

phpFreeChat is a simple, fast, and customizable chat server that uses the filesystem for message and nickname storage. It uses AJAX to smoothly refresh and display the chat zone and the nickname zone. It supports customized CSS stylesheets and a plugin system that allows you to write your own storage routines.

Download PhpFreeChat 0.4 in Softonic

The TomaWeb Image Mapper is a utility that allows you to easily create area maps for the graphics on your website. Features include zoom, HTML code generation and more. Image Mapper works in the browser window. There is no need to upload files to the Net, or even to download the program (although you have the option of doing so, should you wish to create further image maps). To use Image Mapper, you do not need any knowledge of image map HTML code, everything is already created for you. Neither is there any need for an external image-editing program to track your image map coordinates, Image Mapper does it all.

Download Image Mapper 1.0 in Softonic

AlterWind Log Analyzer Lite is free web site statistics software. The free log analyzer helps you determine the basic characteristics of the hits on your site, learn which search engines and search phrases bring you visitors, which referring sites generate the most traffic, and discover and fix errors in the workings of your web site.

Features of Log Analyzer:

• AlterWind Log Analyzer's database contains more than 430 search engines
• Analysis of log files of any format: Apache log analyzer, IIS log analyzer, etc.
• Our web site traffic analyzer automatically detects standard log files formats of Apache and IIS web servers
• Simultaneous analysis of a large number of web server logs. The log files can be in different formats and could come from different servers. This is very convenient for the analysis of the web site stats to mirror and linked web sites
• Full customization of reports. You can change the design of reports, customize the data being entered, and adjust the volume of the report's data

Download AlterWind Log Analyzer Lite 3.3 in Softonic

Dealing with CSS for the uninitiated can be a daunting if not impossible process. Publishing Astyle CSS is a CSS style sheet publisher which allows you to do it visually and create and publish code from a totally visual interface. You do not have to have any coding knowledge, as it features handle markers, bellboys and squares that to mark and publish with ease.

The application effectively creates "order" from your stylesheets with labels, values, colours, margins, sources, images and other properties. It separates the values of the labels which lends some sort of organisation to the document. Even better, it has a previsualisation window which allows you to see how each element will look in the navigator. You've even got the option to label HTML code as well.

With other useful features such as 'the option to clean up HTML documents via CSS and drag and dropping code into the sheets, this is a very user friendly product. However, you'll need to know a little bit about the world of CSS to get going as the user guide is limited.

Download Astyle CSS Editor 3.5 Beta 5 in Softonic

Despite its funny name, Dialogoo actually proves to be an easy way of adding a chat service to your website. It contains support for all manner of bells and whistles to get your visitors talking, including support for emoticons, real-time warnings, webcam calls and voice chat. Once registered on the web page of the author you'll be able to use Dialogoo to generate the JavaScript needed to add to your site.

Despite creating well-functioning chat rooms the program doesn't really allow you to fully customise the environment to fit in with the style of your site. It's compatible with both Internet Explorer and Firefox though, and represents a quick way to harbour a community on your website, which, after all is what everyone wants these days.

Download Dialogoo 2.05 in Softonic

RightWebPage is a free program that verifies and corrects many aspects of websites to conform with International Standard ISO/IEC 23026:2006.

Amongst other things, RightWebPage can verify a single page or entire web site of your choosing.

It can perform HTML Validation against W3C DTDs and WHATWG (X)HTML5 pre-release schemes as well take a visualization of a snapshot with a given character encoding.

Make sure that your website measures up to international standards with RightWebPage.

Download RightWebPage 0.8.0 in Softonic

MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. It is downloadable from mySQL website (http://www.mysql.com) and tailor it to your needs in accordance with the general public license. MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility.

MySQL has a huge range of features but here are some of the best:

• Works on many different platforms
• Support for many data types
• Function names do not clash with table or column names
• You can mix tables from different databases in the same query
• A privilege and password system that is very flexible and secure, and that allows host-based verification
• Full support for several different character sets
• Up to 64 indexes per table are allowed

Download MySQL 6.0.0 Alpha in Softonic

The PHTML Encoder allows encoding PHP scripts before distributing them. The script code logic is preserved while using cryptography to hide your logic from prying eyes. It is possible to lock encoded scripts to predefined machine (Web server) via machine ID so your scripts will work only on this machine.

You can use self-decodable scripts, which do not require any changes to your PHP installation. Because PHTML Encoder is a cross-platform product, this software will work on ALL computer and server platforms which support PHP.

The PHTML Encoder includes console and GUI versions of converter for encryption/decryption of your scripts. You can use wildcards to easily convert a whole project. The PHTML Encoder is transparent to your visitors. It is possible to combine protected and unprotected scripts on one web site.

Download PHTML Encoder 5.0 in Softonic