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The Wait Is Over!!
In a stunning announcement little over a week after Apple announced its move to Intel processors (that was just so amazing I had to mention it too!) REAL Software released the long-awaited successor to REALbasic 5.5, the aging IDE which has played host to a modern compiler and cross platform runtime layer for far too long now, REALbasic version 2005!!
What's New in REALbasic 2005?
The question should be "what isn't new?!"
The New IDE
REALbasic 2005 obviously has a completely new IDE built from scratch in REAL Software's development environment of choice, REALbasic! That's right, the new IDE, sporting a much more streamlined and content-centric and easy-to-navigate user interface, was written in REALbasic itself allowing a much more rapid development cycle than would otherwise be possible. Because it was written in REALbasic, the REALbasic 2005 IDE is now fully cross platform meaning it now runs and compiles on Windows 98/NT/2000/ME/XP, Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, as well as Linux (where the Standard Edition of REALbasic is free), and still compiles for our loveable old pal, Mac OS Classic. Having used the old IDE for years, and seeing the new IDE develop and using it over the last several months, the design of the new IDE is an extremely positive step in the right direction and brings a native consistent look and feel on each platform. The new IDE rocks, and I can't wait for it to get better.
Rapid Release Model
With the release of REALbasic 2005, REAL Software has adopted a new release policy known as the Rapid Release Model. The Rapid Release Model ensures that new versions of REALbasic will be released a minimum of every 90 days (far less than the typical 6 to 12 month release cycle we had before). Not only will each release include tweaks and important bug fixes, but each release will also contain new features. The result is that features and fixes which were previously saved up for the next "major" release will now make their way into the hands of REALbasic developers sooner rather than sitting around for months. With each purchase and upgrade of REALbasic, developers receive 12 months of these updates for free.* (* See the REAL Software website for some important facts about the initial upgrade to REALbasic 2005.)
REALSQLDatabase Built on the Proven Power of SQLite
REALbasic 2005 incorporates a brand-new built-in database class, REALSQLDatabase, which is built on the proven SQLite database engine, the same one use in Apple's own Core Data technology, a premier developer feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Let's face it, the REALDatabase engine was limited, buggy, and slow, and although it may have served it's purpose, the new REALSQLDatabase class does laps around the now-deprecated REALDatabase and embarasses it to no end. REALSQLDatabase is that good. Best of all, the REALSQLDatabase class is a Standard feature in all versions of REALbasic 2005. Proven power for professionals, available to all REALbasic developers!
Container Controls are a Developer's Best Friend
When designing applications, developers often come across places in their applications where either a group of controls needs to be duplicated throughout the program or needs to act as a single control. In REALbasic 5.5 this simply was not possible and required a nightmare of code and duplicated effort to get the job done as best it could. REALbasic 2005's new ContainerControl is an extremely popular feature request that will definitely be warmly welcomed by all those who will ever use it. ContainerControls allow you to group controls together in a single movable object that can even be dynamically placed on windows at runtime! One of the possibilities that the abilities of the ContainerControls now gives to developers is being able to create a detachable pane which can either exist as its own window, or be embedded in another window. The REALbasic 2005 IDE itself uses ContainerControls quite heavily which is an example of one of the many advantages that having the IDE written in REALbasic yields.
Threading
Threading in REALbasic has been continually improved over the years, but in REALbasic 2005 it now takes a giant leap forward. Threading capabilities have been greatly expanding by allowing developers to control the priority of threads and precisely control the state of threads by being able to sleep, suspend, and resume threads at will. The expanded Semaphore class, and new CriticalSection and Mutex classes also makes writing thread-safe code less of a pain and more of a subtle reminder of why you chose to use REALbasic as your development environment.
Soft Declares
Previously, only "hard" declares existed in REALbasic which required all frameworks and libraries that your application declared against to be present on a user's system. If an incompatible version of the library was present or one didn't exist at all, your application would simply refuse to run. In REALbasic 2005, we now have "soft" declares. Rather than requiring the declared method and library to exist and be loaded by the system loader when your application starts up, soft declares move the responsibility to REALbasic to find the library at runtime when the declared method is first used, giving you, the developer, to handle the case where the library of function doesn't exist. After the initial (small) overhead of loading the function, soft declares are just as fast as hard declares.
HTMLViewer
Although the internet has been king for about a decade now, one of the features REALbasic has been missing all this time was the ability to render HTML. Thanks to the WebKit framework on Mac OS X, the Internet Explorer framework on Windows, and whatever they use on Linux (I'm a bit naiive when it comes to Linux), REAL Software was able to include a fully cross-platform HTML rendering solution wrapped in an easy-to-use control. Simply drop in an HTMLViewer and an EditField into a window, have the EditField use the LoadURL method of the HTMLViewer control when the return key is pressed, and whamo! You've got yourself a web browser.
100+ New Features, 200+ Bug Fixes
Aside from some of the major features described here, REALbasic has over 100 new features, and 200 bug fixes, and about a dozen optimizations (including a major boost to Quartz-based picture drawing on Mac OS X). There's no way we'll ever be able to cover ever feature and fix in REALbasic 2005, not just because it would take time away from me actually using it, but also because in the time it would take to discuss them all, two or three new releases would come out in the mean time thanks to the new Rapid Release Model!!
"So, Tell Me What You Really Think"
I really think that REALbasic 2005 is a great release. There's no doubt about it, there are definitely some bugs and rough edges, but overall REALbasic 2005 is perfectly usuable and nice to work in. In my mind it's not so much of what the release is now, at exactly this moment (though like I said, it's a wonderful upgrade), but just imagining how rapidly the both IDE and the runtime will made even better thanks to moving to use REALbasic to create the IDE even makes my Cocoa-loving side smile and nod.
Look forward to a slew of new tutorials and examples for REALbasic 2005 features and explorations!!
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