REALbasic is REALcool

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 11:29pm, Thursday 30 October 2008.

Not too long ago I had someone approach me about building a simple little compiled application that runs on Windows to poll an external database and do some other minimal functions based on the returned dataset. My main focus for several years has been with LAMP (Linux, Apache, and either Perl, Python, or PHP) though I used to do some contracting work with ASP/IIS and much less often some Visual Basic compiled apps.

I know the development PC I used to have is long since gone, though I thought I had a license of Visual Studio 6.0 somewhere at the office or home. No luck... so I sent an email to a good friend of mine that is into .NET asking if I could possibly employ his time to just make the app for me. I tried to bribe him with lunch, beer and finally tickets to the Bengals game.

He said that he was too busy, however he also said l should check out REALBasic and try it out. The common theme you see in my blogs is my recurring ability to be lazy and not want to learn yet another language or application. It took a couple days though I downloaded the trial and gave it a whirl.

I was pleasantly surprised with how close it resembled VB 6 and was so quick and easy to start coding. I have to say it is certainly a nice path for all those die hard VB 6 programmers that want to keep it going vs the .NET path. I liked using the IDE so much I could even say I had fun.

They have a personal and commercial edition of the software (the personal edition was $100 at the time of this post) and also comes equipped with an embedded database that you can create and manage very simply from the interface. From my experience it closely resembles SQLite and may be based on that, not sure. Though they also have another client/server database offering called REAL SQL Server for an additional fee.

OK, if you still aren't excited as I was on this product... drum roll... you can compile your apps to be used on other OS'es such as Linux and Mac, even if you are working on a Windows platform. Not only that, but when you are programming the UI it provides you a selection to look at how it will display, such as how menu bars will change appearance on different platforms to look more native to that OS.

Anyway, perhaps not everyone may think REALbasic is as cool as I do, though I really think that is has a unique market and has some very outstanding features.

GOTO end

-Allan

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