Trying out morfik for application development
I have been watching Morfik for quite some time now. The team - situated in Tasmania, Australia - has been continuously improving the functionality provided in the public releases.
It offers advantages very similar to Java... and honestly i am not sure yet where the exact differences are. It runs both as a desktop- and web-application. Every compiled executable comes with its own webserver and database integrated so you can expect same behavior across platforms.
The only downside to me is that you do have to install an interpreter on your webserver so that the code compiled as a web application will correctly run. We could run it at home and use dyndns to route Internet traffic onto our iMac. But that is not something i would want to do for let's say our site here...
Definitely worth checking out more about Morfik. There are in fact very tools that allow you to deploy your applications to Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Mac at the same time.