Overall, BBEdit 9 is an essential update for existing users, but, regretfully, there’s little truly remarkable here to stop Web designers and coders with itchy feet defecting to the likes of TextMate and Coda.

DX Studio 3 sits somewhere between a game-design engine and an ‘interactive experience’ design tool such as Adobe’s much more expensive Director — but for interactive designers this software is more than capable of producing a multitude of types of high-level interactive media for even the most demanding of clients.

Caspio Bridge's crisp, business-like GUI brings Microsoft Access-like simplicity to building Web databases online. Caspio shines with tight integration with Microsoft Office applications and a clean pricing model. The SQL structure imposed on tables will be welcome to some, but restrictive to others. And while applications are built without coding, many old programmer tricks are still necessary. Table names, for instance, require underscores instead of spaces. The biggest limitation is there's no easy way to add arbitrary logic to Caspio's back end.

XSitePro 2.0 is one of the best applications we’ve seen for aiding novices in creating professional-looking websites. But that needs to be borne in mind: this is not really a program for professionals themselves. Although it can create such things as scripts for search pages, XSitePro 2.0 handles page generation for you rather than being a tool for complex dynamic sites.

Layout designers are unlikely to be impressed by the overtly template-driven approach and office-application-style interface. And professionals are still better catered for by Dreamweaver or Expression Web, both of which offer superior workflow, scope and output, although at a higher cost.

We haven't found any downside to installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1, other than the time; it took me several hours to download and install it over a relatively good broadband connection: if we had to do it again, we'd kick it off just before we went home for the day. Note that the updated MSDN documentation requires a separate download and installation. Once installed, the SP1 changes are, in our experience, all good. Unless you have add-ons or SDKs that still require Visual Studio 2005 (the .Net Micro Framework comes to mind), we don't see any reason for a Microsoft shop not to completely switch over to Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Expression Web 2 is an effective tool, allowing you to build sites that comply with XHTML, CSS, XML, and XSLT standards; its support for ASP.NET 3.5 allows the drag-and-drop use of assets such as Silverlight applications. This, the full support for Photoshop files and PHP pages, and the ability to insert Flash SWF and Windows Media files, make this probably the most valuable part of Expression Studio for the widest range of users.

Blend 2 has a number of limitations, including on what assets can be outputted when developing for the Web with Silverlight. However, it also has some neat features such as its integration with Visual Studio.

For the majority of users looking to run a single Web shop and who want more features than the standard stores offered by many ISPs, Actinic Catalog 9.0 is an excellent piece of software. Unless you need advanced payment and authorisation procedures (in which case Actinic Business is recommended), this will do everything that you need.

It is almost unfair to review the Google App Engine when it is just a beta operation, but Google has a habit of leaving some tools in beta form for a long time. There are a number of places where the documentation and the code suggest that Google will add more functionality pretty soon. The basic framework and the database are both quite nice, although limited. We can imagine Google adding better automatic features for generating the CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) routines common in these applications. Integration with Google's Wallet might also be quite useful, although it's bound to be complicated by the banking system. Some people have already experimented with mapping the Google Web Toolkit to the system, even though that's written in Java and translated into JavaScript. Google might also provide some good tools that allow the different hosted applications to share user information, in essence allowing a user to move their preferences and some of their data to other applications. This kind of inter-application linking could be pretty cool. Time will tell what Google delivers. In the meantime, this is a good sandbox for playing with simple database applications. There's a very good reason why the beta version has a waiting list.