Chapter 11. Scripting and Extending REALbasic

IN THIS, THE LAST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK, I want to cover ways of extending REALbasic. The first topic is how to make your own REALbasic applications scriptable. This, in effect, will allow your own users to extend your applications. This will be followed by a section describing how to use REALbasic to automate Microsoft Office applications and how you can use those applications to add functionality to your REALbasic applications. Finally, I will review Declares and plug-ins. A Declare is a way of calling a function in a shared library and a plug-in is a static library that you can compile into your application.

By their very nature, Declares and plug-ins have to be coded platform specific (although the developer can hide those details from the user). Effectively using Declares or writing plug-ins requires extensive knowledge about the underlying platforms because you, as the developer, will no longer be shielded from this. Because this book is about cross-platform development with REALbasic, and not about writing C ++ code for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, the depth of this coverage will be limited. I'll share enough to get you started and point you in the direction of additional information when it's available.