REALbasic Release 1
Volume Number: 14
Issue Number: 10
Column Tag: Tools Of The Trade
Review: REALbasic Release 1
by Scott J. Anchin
Edited by the MacTech Magazine Editorial Staff
The Power and Simplicity of BASIC
For some time now, Macintosh developers have been searching for a Mac OS equivalent
to Microsoft's popular Visual Basic. Enter REAL Software's REALbasic, a visual
object-oriented development environment well suited for a variety of tasks ranging
from RAD to full-scale commercial application development.
The Basics
REALbasic uses an object-oriented implementation of the BASIC (Beginners
All-purpose Standard Instruction Code) language. Like all modern object-oriented
programming languages such as C++ and Java, REALbasic uses classes, inheritance,
properties and methods. This allows a simplified approach to programming by allowing
code to be reused throughout a project. REALbasic's syntax is also highly compatible
with that of Microsoft's Visual Basic, a similar (but in this author's opinion inferior)
development tool. This allows developers accustomed to writing software on the PC to
feel at home with REALbasic, a definite advantage to cross-platform software authors.
REALbasic supports automatic garbage collection, much like Java. This frees the
developer from having to worry about memory management, which in and of itself
takes up much of the development time when working with many other languages.
The IDE
The Interface
The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) contains all of the expected features in
a small streamlined package. Occupying as little as 1.5 Mbytes of RAM, the IDE is
blazing fast and incredibly simple to use. The IDE consists of six main components: the
Toolbar, the Properties window, the Colors window, the Project window, the Code
Editor, and the Debugger
Figure 1. The Toolbar and the Properties window.
The toolbar (see Figure 1) is located by default on the left side of the screen and