REALbasic 5.5 is shipping from REAL Software, and the new version of development environment adds the ability to build Linux applications from Mac and Windows systems, as well as other features of particular interest to Mac OS X users. “Even if Mac users have never had any experience with programming before, they can learn REALbasic and create useful applications to improve their productivity,” Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software, told MacMinute.
REALbasic adds ability to build Linux applications
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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You guys have to try this out. If you know VB at all you can create some really cool cross platform applications right away. Apple should buy this development system! Visual Basic is MS secret weapon, and nobody sees this. The reason why my IT department uses windows is because our programers are old school Cobal programmers and Visual Basic is easy to learn. If Apple bought RealBASIC they could push their platform into the enterprise!
Just realize that this product doesn’t SUCK like VB does. It’s a really well done Object Oriented language. Personally I hope that Apple doesn’t buy it so. That way there is a greater chance they’ll port the IDE to Linux.
If I could actually use the IDE in Linux rather then just compiling the program so that it can run on linux.
LOL, thats like saying I should write all of my window programs on an apple.
http://www.runrev.com
I don’t want to distract from RealBasic’s moment in the sun. But if people are interested in cross-platform development environments that can produce native cross-platform code….
This environment also produces cross-platform code for Win32, OS X, OS 9, unix, FreeBSD and Linux. But it is quite different from most programming environments – it has a very shallow learning curve, and the programming language is much more ‘english-like’ than normal.
If you want a hard-core oo framework – it is not for you. It is object-based and uses message-passing. But it is remarkably powerful and high-level.
It is descended from HyperCard, and uses the same card/stack framework, and thus the programs have their own GUI and persistence model. Thus the model and the implentation have undergone circa 20 years of use and refinement.
I think it is a bit of an unknown, because Runrev mostly seem to target Mac developers, presumably because they think that those developers will ‘get it’ more easily.
The screenshots show the Bluecurve interface. Is this like SUN’s idea of “native looking” which is “draw it so that it looks somewhat similar to bluecurve” or does it really use GTK to do the rendering?
I ask this, because the buttons at the bottom of the program look non-bluecurvish.
http://www.realsoftware.com/realbasic/rb55screens/l_lnx_compiled.jp…
RealBasic uses native controls on every platform. It has always worked great with themes on Mac OS 8 and now it works with themes on Windows XP and GNOME – Mac OS X has no official themes other than Aqua, but if you use third-party applications to switch themes on OS X, Realbasic uses them, too.
The buttons at the bottom look non-bluecurvish because they’re much too small – RealBasic doesn’t change the size of controls automatically for different platforms, so you have to resize the controls manually if you want larger buttons on Linux.
I’m a vb programmer you hoped to utilize realbasic cross platform goodness. But let me tell you it was not at all worth the money I spent on version 5.4 in January.
The windows ide was still very new and very buggy. I made my software like that I could be fired. The standard version of vb provides tons more features. And vb convertor must be some sort of joke.
You cant even access more than 10 records from a db at one time! How ridiculous!
I only wish I had bought it from realbasic direct so I could have got my money back. But who knows maybe things have changed in this release.
It seems you can only build Linux applications, but it does not have the IDE for Linux.
Ok, I’ve seen all the previous attempts to convert VB code to other platforms and these, believe me (a developer), that these statements are made for non-developers, i.e. people who don’t understand the issues involved in porting apps.
Yeah, if you want to port a hello world app, that’s fine. But are they going to port COM to Linux? No. DCOM? No. ActiveX controls? No. What do you think a VB app is built upon? ActiveX Controls and COM infrastructure.
There is no way a small company like that is going to do all that. Don’t believe the hype.
It may not port your current applications but it opens the doors to new applications being written for all three platforms. I have written applications with real basic and vb and I agee with the fact that certain applications will not port because certain libraries are not available on all platforms but if you are a real programmer you can also implement a lot of functions yourself as opposed to the entire “cut and paste” ActiveX business in VB.
IMHI the basic language is a joke. There is a many useable languages/environments available under linux (C++ with many IDEs (like KDevelop, Anjuta, etc) and class libs (like wxWidgets, Qt, etc), Object Pascal (Kylix/Free Pascal+Lazarus), C# (mono + MonoDevelop), java (JBuilder, Eclipse, Netbeans, etc). Nobody needs Visual (or any other) basic under linux.
“Nobody needs Visual (or any other) basic under linux …”
Like it or not, a very large percentage of Database front ends are written in BASIC. Many windows applications are written in basic.
The point is this … one reason why Windows dominates the market is because of the amount of software availible to it. OS X and Linux are not going to be adopted until VB applications are ported to them.
People can convert VB to RealBASIC if they actually wrote some code, and did not use a bunch of buggy Active X controls! In fact, that is what I hate about VB. We always see “*.OCX” file not regisisterd “*.DLL” error blah blah problems with VB. With realBASIC you get a solid EXE!! I prefere to use it for Windows only Apps as well. BTW if you want to be lazy, I think you can use COM objects in the PC version.
Check http://www.blitzbasic.com … this is coming to OS X and Linux in the form of Blitz Max and will do apps and OpenGL games.
None of the stuff you mention is even close to what VB does, VB is a RAD tool, it allows development speeds that you just can’t get with c++, not to mention that the IDE is a lot better for RAD than those you mention.
Today another Visual Basic like for linux proyect released a new version. I think this is the best open source proyect in linux right now, and is incredible how fast they are working ahead the 1.0 version…today they implemented the sintaxys completion in the IDE…they have a net component, acces to mysql and postgre…and a lot more
gambas.sourceforge.net
sorry for my bad English
How easy is it going to be to maintain code in REALBasic? From my brief experience with the IDE, there does’t seem to be a way to view all the methods and variables on a single page. You get to see individual functions/method/properties, but you don’t get to see all of them together. Hard to explain really, until you try it out. Basically (pun not intended), you are unable to view the source of say a class and scroll through the source. It displays individual methods and functions on a single page. To get to another function/method, you need to use the class browser thing. Even worse, it takes one page(!!) to display each property.
I’m thinking this would be a nightmare for anyone who had to maintain code someone else wrote. You’ll need a barrage of mouse clicks just to navigate through a single class. Whole project…. *shudder*
I expect that the reason there’s no IDE for Linux is because there would be very few sales. Linux devs tend to use tools which they get bundled for free with their distro.
The general thing in Linux land seems to be to get excited about companies supporting Linux when products are being promoted, but then to either not buy the product or to use a cracked version. Borland found this with Kylix.
This trend towards using stuff gratis is even in evidence within companies. At work, we use eclipse, java, apache, apache ant, apache xalan etc and deploy onto Linux Servers.
Used to use JBuilder but why pay when eclipse is free?
Still have Windows on the desktop, but the MS apps run on Citrix metaframe, so once there’s an acceptable minimum level of look/feel/functionality/standardisation in the Linux desktop, we’ll probably make the move.