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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. It was originally called CrossBasic due to its ability to compile the same programming code for Mac OS and Windows (although the integrated development environment 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 April 2006, of Macs based on the Apple-Intel architecture).

Language features

RB is a strongly-typed language with minimal automatic type conversion, which supports inheritance and interfaces, class methods and class properties, reference counting, and operator overloading. As described in the language reference, its built-in framework supports hash tables, cooperative threads, real-time 3D graphics, sound, XML parsing and generation, full Unicode support, application programming interface calls to compiled C libraries on all supported platforms, Visual Basic datatypes compatibility, regular expressions, QuickTime, serial communications, sockets (both TCP and UDP), SSL, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, SOAP, scripting language support through RBScript, Apple events, Address book, Windows registry, system tray icons, ActiveX and OLE (REAL Software 2006).

File Format

The source file format contains window and control placement data and is proprietary, although XML import and export are supported. 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.

Current Editions of IDE

There are two versions of the IDE:

• The professional edition can compile programs for Mac OS X, Mac Classic, Linux and Windows 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, can remote debug 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's graphical user interface 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.

Example code

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)

References

• Smith, Tony (September 13 2005). "RealBasic 2005 for Mac, Windows and Linux". The Register. Retrieved 2006-04-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Barr, Joe (August 4 2005). "Review: REALBasic 2005 for Linux". Linux.com. Retrieved 2006-04-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• REAL Software (April 10 2006). "REALbasic Language Reference". REAL Software. Retrieved 2006-04-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)

External links

• REAL Software, Inc., makers of REALbasic.
• Made with REALbasic Showcase
• RBDocs, a wiki dedicated to REALBasic documentation
• REALbasic Developer Magazine
• RBLibrary
• REALDev, a wiki-powered developer community and code repository

See also

• RBScript
• Visual Basic

• Integrated development environments
• Programming languages
• Object-oriented programming languages
• BASIC dialects