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REALbasic
REALbasic icon
REALbasic 2005 IDE
REALbasic 2005 IDE
The REALbasic 2005 IDE running on Mac OS X
Developer(s)REAL Software, Inc.
Stable release2006 R1 / January 11th, 2006
Operating systemMac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux
TypeProgramming
LicenseCommercial
WebsiteREAL Software, Inc

REALbasic (RB) is an object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language developed and commercially marketed by REAL Software, Inc in Austin, Texas for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.

History

REALBasic was created by Andrew Barry, who has since moved on to creating ExtremeBasic. It was originally called CrossBasic due to its ability to compile the same programming code for Mac OS and Windows (although the IDE was Mac only). It was then redubbed REALbasic by REAL Software when they took over development in 1997. The IDE is now available for all three supported platforms (with the exception, as of February 2006, of Intel Macs).

Language features

RB is a strongly typed language with minimal automatic type conversion, that supports single inheritance and multiple interfaces, class methods and class properties, reference counting (similar to Java), definition of customized arithmetic operators (similar to C++). It has a complete feature set supporting hash tables, threads, real-time 3D graphics, sound, XML parsing and generation (even through XSL), full Unicode support, API calls to compiled C libraries on all supported platforms, Visual Basic datatypes compatibility, regular expressions, QuickTime, serial, TCP/IP sockets, SSL, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, SOAP, scripting language support through RBScript, Apple events, Address book, Windows registry, system tray icons, ActiveX and OLE.

File Format

The source file format contains window and control placement data and is proprietary; however, XML import and export and Visual Basic import functionality is included. All source code can be contained in one project file, but it is also possible to have classes/modules in separate files in the same way as most other languages or dialects can. REALbasic compiles directly to machine language for each platform that it supports (Mac OS X, MS Windows, Linux).

Current Editions of IDE

File:REALbasic 2006.png
A typical GUI building session in REALbasic

There are two versions of the IDE:

  • The professional edition can compile programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Microsoft Windows (plus Mac OS) from the same source code file; it can also access databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc.) including the built-in single-user REAL SQL Database engine based on SQLite; it compiles console applications and has numerous other features.
  • The standard edition only compiles programs for the platform that the IDE is running on (either Windows, Linux or Mac), and does not allow access to databases other than the built-in REAL SQL Database.

Both versions of the IDE permit building the application GUI by dragging the controls from a palette to their parent window. Layout of the controls is helped by the IDE that permits aligning them (both horizontally and vertically), and which gives informations about the distance between controls, or between a control and the window borders.

More screenshots

File:RB2006 Code Editor.png
The code editor editing a window event code
File:RB2006 Language Reference.png
The Language References with a partial list of REALbasic classes
File:Realbasic1winf.jpg
RealBasic 2005 in Windows (designing a form)

Example code

Hello world

Dim Salutation As String
Salutation = "Hello, world"
MsgBox(Salutation)

MD5 hash

Here's some sample code that computes the MD5 hash of a given string: 

Dim Hash As String
Dim Digest As New MD5Digest
Digest.Process("Source")
Digest.Process(" String")

Operator overloading

This is an example of operator overloading for a hypothetical Complex class which permits to sum a real to a complex number, and to sum two complex numbers: 

Function Operator_Add(rhs as Simple) As Complex
 Dim ret As New Complex
 ret.R = Self.R + rhs
 ret.I = Self.I
 Return ret
End Function
Function Operator_Add(rhs as Complex) As Complex
 Dim ret As New Complex
 ret.R = Self.R + rhs.R
 ret.I = Self.I + rhs.I
 Return ret
End Function

The same function can be defined to accept Double datatype values. This code shows how to use the Complex class to sum a real with a complex number: 

Dim First As New Complex(0, 1)
Dim Second As New Complex(1, 1)
Dim Sum As Complex
Sum = First + 5.0 + Second
// Sum will be (6, 2)


External links

See also

Categories: