Review date
16 February 2003
If you an advanced web developer looking for a down and dirty development tool suite to design powerful and functional web sites without putting out a lot of pocket greenery, look no further than MetaProducts’ Web Studio.
This isn’t your sister’s editor for designing a site featuring pictures of her cat published on her personal ISP homepage. This is the serious stuff for hardcore Java Monkeys, PHP Fiends, and HTML Gurus. Web Studio is a web SDK for site designers who know the code behind the pages you see on the web. Don’t expect a WYSIWYG editor.
Web Studio is a development tool for working with HTML/XML, Jscript, PHP, Perl, ActiveX, VBScript, and CSS. An integrated FTP client allows a nice alternative to FrontPage extensions. A tags editor allows the creation of custom toolbars. Templates are managed through the use of a template manager program. Web Studio also sports an advanced replacement to the Windows notepad with code sensitive syntax highlighting.
Wizards take you through most of the routine chores of setting up a new site. I am highly impressed with the documentation which includes a web language code reference. The SDK is great for advanced users but is definitely not for novices who should stick with a simpler editor. If you are a journeyman or master website developer and are looking for an effective and inexpensive web dev SDK, Web Studio may be up your alley. Give the shareware version a try by downloading below.
