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FEATURE

From 2002 to 2025

Upgrading an Ancient REALbasic Project

Issue: 23.5 (September/October 2025)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 25,935
Starting Page Number: 32
Article Number: 23505
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Excerpt of article text...

I launched xDev (then REALbasic Developer) on a shoestring in 2002. When I researched magazine subscriber management systems, the software was extremely expensive—and most required an annual service contract that cost thousands per year. That was out of the question, so naturally, I wrote my own system in REALbasic.

As you can imagine, that system is an important part of my business. It needs to keep track of all subscribers, their contact info, subscription type, how many issues they have remaining, and so on. If those records were corrupted or lost, I'd be in trouble.

So far—knock on wood—that original 2002 software has been working reliably for over 20 years!

There have been many times I've wanted to add some improvements or make some changes, but doing that has always made me nervous. The maxim "Don't fix what ain't broken" is valid for a reason. Even when REALbasic added significant language and framework improvements that would have benefited my app, I have hesitated to improve it.

For instance, the original app was written before REALbasic supported Unicode. I discovered this in a harsh way when an overseas subscriber included accented characters in their contact info. The Unicode characters were double-byte, which messed up my database as it didn't expect or support that. (Fortunately, I have a robust backup system for my subscriber app that saves a backup copy of the entire database before every change to the file, so I was able to go back one version and not lose any data except that one new subscriber, which I was easily able to add back in—without the accented characters.)

My "interim" solution was to scrub all Unicode characters from data before adding anything to the database. When REALbasic began supporting Unicode, I should have added Unicode support to my database, but the system I had worked, and I didn't do that. I thought that was temporary, but now it's 20 years later, and I still haven't done it!

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