REALbasic

By Martin Heller

August 9, 2004

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The promise was enticing: a way to port Visual Basic applications to Linux and the Mac. Further investigation revealed a two-step process: Port a Visual Basic application to REALBasic on Windows, and then compile it for a standalone target, which can be Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS 8-9, or x86 Linux. Compared to having to learn Linux development, it still sounded easy.

I bit, and the REALbasic folks sent me a license key. I downloaded the 20 MB REALbasic for Windows IDE, and I was off to the races, sort of. A CD with the whole package arrived in a few days, and I installed that over the bits I'd downloaded. Then REAL Software released a new version of the package, so I downloaded all the new parts of that—the IDE, the samples, and the remote debugging clients.

REALbasic adopts Visual Basic's general design paradigm: Construct the user interface of your application, and then write event-handling code for it. Over several years of doing VB development, I found it to be easy up to a point, and then difficult. The difficulties came when I wanted to do something that Visual Basic didn't support natively, when I wanted to develop a Visual Basic application as part of a team, and when I wanted to modify a large VB program.

To go beyond VB's native support, I would call Win32 APIs, or write my own DLLs or COM objects in C++. To develop VB applications in a team, I'd partition the project into chunks, use a source code control system, insist on a lot of internal documentation, and spend a lot of time managing. To modify a large VB program, I'd generally feel like I was swimming in molasses, but I'd eventually find the place I needed to change by browsing or debugging the code.

The most interesting VB program still under my control—because the magazine that sponsored it no longer exists—is the WinTun98 program. I was able to import the two forms from that application and their supporting code into REALbasic without much fuss: I had to change one variable name which conflicted with a REALbasic system function.

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