Local Links
External Links
Contact
Search this site
Where REALbasic wins
Two areas where REALbasic beats all other development languages
REALbasic, a language similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic, is little known to most developers. I like to point out two areas in which it really shines, so you might consider it for your next project:
Truly Cross-Platform
REALbasic applications can run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS, often without any tweaking necessary: Develop on either of these Systems, and generate code that runs on all three.
While I've written now two bigger user-interface driven apps successfully in REALbasic, the best proof for this is REALbasic's own IDE, which is written in its own language, under its own IDE, and which runs on all platforms.
I refer to portability of user interfaces here, mainly. Sure, there's Java and Qt. And Java does quite a good job, actually, but Qt is just a pain to use compared to REALbasic, in my opinion. OTOH, Java is free of cost while REALbasic is not.
Efficient Plugin Architecture
REALbasic-made applications can load user-written code and execute it at optimal speed.
Many languages and development environments nowadays provide such a thing: Load a script and run it, then process its results. However, usually such script code runs at a slower speed as it has to be interpreted (Java may be an exception here with its byte-code runtime compiler).
REALbasic gives you two advantages here: Basically, what the REALbasic runtime library provides is an included compiler and linker (called RBScript). That way, your app can load and compile additional source code, then have that code linked to the app. Since this extra code is compiled into native CPU instructions, the code can execute at the same speed that the main app runs at. Furthermore, your app can control which functions the compiled code can execute. This way, this extra code lives in a sandbox from which it can't cause damage if you don't want it.
See here for more on using RBScript for plugins with REALbasic.