Chapter 1. Introduction to REALbasic


REALBASIC IS A MODERN, OBJECT-ORIENTED DESCENDENT of the venerable Basic programming language that I first encountered in my high school computer programming class, whose code I laboriously typed out on a dot-matrix terminal.

The original version of the language was developed in 1964. It was designed to be a good language for beginning programmers to learn, which is the very reason I learned to use it. In fact, the name "Basic" means Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Microsoft released its first version of the language in the mid-1970s. New life was breathed into the language in 1991, when Microsoft released Visual Basic 1.0 (the latest iteration of Visual Basic is known as Visual Basic .NET, or Visual Basic 7.0, which was first released in 2001). Visual Basic was a modern version of Basic that made it much easier to develop programs with graphical user interfaces. Because it is a highly accessible language that's easy to learn and capable of enabling programmers to develop applications quickly, programmers have flocked to it, and now Visual Basic has a huge base of users.

REAL Software, Inc., the company responsible for REALbasic, was founded in 1996. REALbasic first came to prominence when it was released in 1998 as a tool for rapid application development on the Macintosh platform. Although AppleScript was an easy-to-use language for scripting applications, it was not usable at that time as a tool for developing applications. As a result, REALbasic established itself as the perfect entry-level application development environment for the Macintosh.

The language has its roots in the Macintosh environment, but the plan from the beginning was to develop a cross-platform development environment. In 1999, REALbasic Professional Edition for Macintosh shipped. For the first time, it included the capability to compile Windows applications.

The next real step forward came in 2003, when REAL Software added a Windows version of the IDE with the release of REALbasic 5.0. The 5.0 release was an important one for REALbasic and also included the addition of new features that made it a much more viable programming language for serious application developers. It included the capability to write command-line applications and support for XML (which was a feature surprisingly late in arriving). Although you had been able to compile Windows apps since 1999, this was the first time you could develop them in Windows. Version 5.5, released in 2004, added the capability to compile Linux apps.




REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development
REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development
ISBN: 0672328135
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 149

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