Summary

Now that XML, regular expressions, and a little more information about StyledText is under your belt, in the next chapter I will continue with another text-related topic. The topic of the previous chapter was creating desktop applications, and the topic of the next will be creating console applications. A console application is one that does not have a graphical user interface. It runs on the command line or as a service (or daemon) in memory. Console programs accept input in the form of text and produce output in the form of text. I will show you an example of how to use a REALbasic console application to implement a CGI application, which is used to create dynamic html pages, which means more dealings with XML. I will also cover REALbasic's Shell class. Although the Shell class is most often used in desktop applications, it performs a related task to console applications. The Shell class is used to interact with the command-line interfaces of the host operating systems. In fact, you could use the Shell class to execute REALbasic console applications. To illustrate the Shell, I will share a sample application called Ant Shell, which provides a graphical user interface to the command-line program Ant, from the Apache Foundation. It's an automated build tool, somewhat like Make, that is written in Java and uses XML build files.