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FEATURE

It's Alive! It's 5.5!

What's New in the Latest Version of REALbasic

Issue: 2.4 (March/April 2004)
Author: Matt Neuburg
Author Bio: Matt Neuburg is the author of REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, and a member of the editorial board of REALbasic Developer.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,475
Starting Page Number: 16
Article Number: 2410
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Excerpt of article text...

The white-coated folks in REAL's laboratory have been tinkering for a year since the last major version (5.0), and the results are impressive. Here's a survey of the main changes to expect in REALbasic 5.5. (The standard disclaimers apply: I'm describing the latest beta available at the time of writing, but things could change while we go to print; and, no animals were harmed during the production of this article.)

The Big Picture

REAL has started to implement building Linux applications (RedHat and SuSE, initially); I've no direct experience of this, but I'm told that the effort is still largely inicipient. There's no Linux IDE, either; you develop on Mac or Windows, just as in the old days you could develop for Windows only on Mac. But cross-platform development is easier than before, because now there's remote debugging.

Here's how remote debugging works. Let's say you've two machines (which we'll think of as local and remote). They can be running different operating systems: for example, Mac OS X locally and Windows remotely. On the remote machine, you run a server app called the stub. On the local machine, you run the REALbasic IDE, and you tell it where the stub is (on a local network, it will discover the stub automatically). Now you develop locally as usual, but when you want to run in the IDE, instead of Debug > Run, you choose Debug > Run Remotely. Presto, REALbasic builds for the appropriate platform and, by talking to the stub, copies the built app to the remote machine and launches it! Human interaction with the running app takes place on the remote machine, but the debugger, if we drop into it, appears on the local machine. Thus the edit-run-debug cycle is extremely convenient when cross-compiling; it also avoids window refresh issues that can arise when editing and debugging on the same machine.

REALbasic can now also build console apps, meaning faceless apps to be called from the command line. The App object is an instance of ConsoleApplication, and on startup its Run method is called with an array of command-line arguments. The Run method can interact with the Terminal via Input and Print calls, and when it exits, the app quits. Optionally, a console app can be a service app, where "service" means (as on Windows) a server process intended to run even without a user logged in; here, the App is a ServiceApplication instance. Also, REALbasic Mac OS X apps can now be Mach-O, enabling declares to Mach-O shared libraries and frameworks.

There are two more major reorganizational moves. The REALdatabase engine has been rewritten, and is now part of the standard license. And the Office Automation plug-ins are abandoned; this feature is now built into the IDE.

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