Is REALBasic worth $50?

Question

As a Windows and web developer of 12+ years and an "at home" Mac user, I'm wondering if it's worth it to get the REALBasic for personal use. I've often wanted to dabble in development for OS X; I know VB, Java, C#, but not C, C++, or Objective-C. I don't have a specific project in mind and haven't been motivated to learn Objective-C, so I'm wondering if RB would be easy and good enough to get me started with some small apps.

Here are my concerns/questions:

• I haven't heard much about REALBasic in the "real world" - there is only one question on stackoverflow tagged with "realbasic" - so, is it a viable development environment, or is it just a "toy" language/IDE?

• Are there any quirks or gotchas with apps written/compiled with RB?

• Are there any commercial apps out there that are written in RB?

Answer 1

For at home, personal use, I'd consider it. I've used it before and it's fine for that type of use. However, I can't say I'd have it as my first choice for multi-dev teams, or even large single-dev projects.

Answer 2

If you want to develop simple GUI applications for the supported platforms RealBasic at $50 is a bargain. It's not a state of the art development environment, but for some jobs it's absolutely the right tool.

Answer 3

If memory serves, OpenSong is written in RealBASIC. I've played with the demo, and while there were things that I liked about it, I think that you'd be better off working with something a little more widely distributed.

Its not a "toy" language, and you can do some serious development with it.

Answer 4

I think mono would be a better platform to use in Mac OS X.

The knowledge is easier to transfer, platform more widely used and it's free.

Answer 5

To answer your questions specifically...

I haven't heard much about REALBasic in the "real world" - there is only one question on stackoverflow tagged with "realbasic" - so, is it a viable development environment, or is it just a "toy" language/IDE?

Sure, it's a viable envirnoment for most types of applications. I currently use it at home and at work. I have developed and distributed cross-platform apps across the enterprise assist with our digital asset management efforts, marketing authomation with Applescript, plus a gazillion effective little apps that get me through my day.

Are there any quirks or gotchas with apps written/compiled with RB?

Nothing that a little defensive programming can't take care of and nothing that can't be done until the issues with OS are resolved. But that's the same as it is with most languages.

Are there any commercial apps out there that are written in RB?

Absolutely. But I don't think it's really commonplace for commercial applications to advertise the development environment in which they were built.

@ARKBAN

the code is not in a plain text file. That means you can't really use version control, and you can't have multiple developers work on it -- ever.

This is incorrect and has been for quite a while. REALbasic exports to XML and VCP formats.

I'll spare adding a link to the download page for fear of my response being tagged as spam. I think you'll be able to sort it out from here.

Cheers

Answer 6

$50 is not much money these days and REALbasic Personal is absolutely worth it. It's a bargain, even. For what you say you want to do, it should be perfect.

The current versions of REALbasic are quite robust. They can save projects in text file format for use with source control. I use it with Subversion on multi-person teams every day. It's fully object-oriented, has introspection capabilities, has had extension methods for years (C# only got them in .NET 3.0), includes SQLite as its built-in database and much more.

There are downsides of course. It doesn't yet create Cocoa apps (they are Carbon right now), it doesn't have as many built-in controls as some other IDEs, it uses quite a bit of RAM and it's harder to automate builds than it should be. Still, REALbasic is a far cry from a toy language. It's just saddled with a bad name :-)

But, I guarantee you'll have your first OS X app created within minutes of using REALbasic.

Update: As of 2010, The REALbasic programming environment is now known as REAL Studio (the language is still REALbasic, though).

Answer 7

As a language, REALbasic is cleaner than most and has idioms that C# has only just added in recent versions (such as extends methods).

The cross-platform framework is very easy to use and well-integrated into the IDE. The integration is so smooth it tends to obscure the true OO nature of the framework and elegant way in which events have been designed into the language - some people dismiss it as a VB6 clone but are very wrong.

The IDE lacks some features compared to Visual Studio but is also far easier to use and with less visual noise. It has a few features, especially the history and navigation, which are superior to Visual Studio and make it surprisingly easy to get around a large project.

The one major point I'd hold against it for hobbyist programming is that it can be quite memory-intensive, running poorly on machines with less than 1GB RAM. Having said that, I use it quite happily on a 1.5GHz, 1.25GB PPC PowerBook 12" (my traveling machine) provided I'm careful what else I'm running at the same time.

I also work in Visual Studio and XCode - neither compares to the ease of being able to fling programs together in REALbasic.

Answer 8

>> Is REALBasic worth $50?

Yes, definately. Last time I checked it was listed for over 6 times that. I would say, for $50, it is worth finding out for yourself.

>> Is REALBasic a viable development environment?

It all depends, for hobby stuff, and perhaps some small business it can be a great tool, even if just to mockup UI. RB can basically do everything Carbon can so there's not really a clear limit to what you could make it do.

Its hard to recommend REALBasic over Cocoa in Objective-C with Xcode, but I can imagine cases where I would. Your case isn't clear enough to me to make any recommendation.

REALBasic is a lot easier to pick up then the recommended toolchain for Mac OS X, and it has the advantages that it is somewhat similar to VisualBasic, and that it can be cross compiled to Windows and even Linux.

>> Are there any quirks or gotchas with apps written/compiled with RB?

Other than that they seem a larger than I would think they need to be, they are Carbon, not Cocoa

>> Are there any commercial apps out there that are written in RB?

Probably, but I am not aware of any.

Answer 9

REALbasic is an excellent environment to use if you wish to create Cross Platform applications, it is far from a 'toy' language. There are many commercial applications written with RB.

The IDE is not the greatest but it is fine and works well with Subversion for Version Control in a team environment.

The availability of the MBS and Einhugur Plugins opens up RB and gives you some very powerful functionality.

All my current commercial apps are written in RB - and no-one has asked for a refund because it was written in RB :-) If the apps do the job asked of them at a reasonable cost then nobody really cares about the language.

It won't cost you much to try it anyway :-) You can see my stuff at the Arten Science website.

Cheers - Steve

Answer 10

Java comes with every Mac OS X, it comes with native bindings for Cocoa (although they're not kept up to date since 10.4 I believe). Personally I've used Java with SWT to develop applications on Mac OS X (that also had to run on a PocketPC device) and I find Mac OS X + PostgreSQL + Eclipse + Java a nice development environment. You also know it - but this may be a reason to not choose it if you use it at work every day :-)!

Answer 11

REALbasic is a good language, and it can be used to start programming Mac OS X from who doesn't want to learn Objective-C immediately. I started to use REALbasic Pro when I had a Windows PC, and it was the reason I bought my first Mac (which was necessary to test the applications I created for Mac); now I have only two Macs, and I don't use REALbasic anymore.

The reason that I stopped to use it is that Apple gives Xcode free, and I prefer to use a IDE that allows me to create a Cocoa application, rather than an IDE that only allows me to create Carbon applications. The other reason is that for doing something more complicated, it requires you to have plugins to do what it is not possible to do directly (actually there are two good plugins which can be used).

To make it short, REALbasic is worth the price you pay for it; if then have REALbasic for Windows and REALbasic for Mac, you can use some of the code you develop for both the platforms.
Certainly, software developed using REALbasic is few, and only who knows REALbasic is normally able to understand if an application is made with REALbasic, expecially if the application exposes RBScript to the final user.