What s New in REALbasic 2005

What's New in REALbasic 2005

An easier question to answer would be what isn't new in REALbasic 2005. With the release of this version, the integrated development environment (IDE) has been totally overhauled and much improved, especially if you have used the Windows version of REALbasic 5.5 which, well, let's just let bygones be bygones.

With the 2005 release, REAL Software offers integrated development environments for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux. The IDE was written in REALbasic, which means that the interface is now consistent across platforms. Although you could create cross-platform apps with REALbasic prior to this, the actual IDE was quite different between the Windows and Macintosh versions. If you are a Windows developer who tried RB 5.0 and was disappointed with it, you should give RB 2005 a chance. Your experience will be totally different.

The IDE makes it extremely easy to develop applications with graphical user interfaces (in fact, until RB 5.0, apps with GUIs were all you could create). It provides easy access to databases and it's possible to write a client app that browses a database without writing a single line of code.

There are two versions of REALbasicStandard and Professional. The difference between the two is that with the Professional Edition, you can compile your application in all three platforms, whereas in the Standard Edition, you can compile the application only for the host environment. Although it's officially capable of compiling on Linux, I've had success running it on FreeBSD, one of the Unix variants.