REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2005 for Linux, a groundbreaking new visual development environment for Linux, is available for public beta and can be downloaded now from www.realsoftware.com/demo. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be offered for free when it ships in August. The Mac OS X version was posted today.
Public Beta of REALbasic 2005 for Linux, for free
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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>”REALbasic 2005 for Linux provides a solution to two issues in the Linux market,” stated Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software. First is the lack of a good Visual Basic-like development environment
http://gambas.sourceforge.net/
Gambas is both good and Visual Basic-like, and it’s free.
Gambas is <blink>NOT</blink> a clone!
Gambas is not intended as an easy way to port visual basic apps to linux. But were ever Gambas is discussed it is compared to VB.
REALbasic does strive to be VB compatible
RB has several other advantages
1) Compile for 3 platforms (Linux GTK, OSX and Windows), from one source (99% at least)
2) A huge set of plugins, comparable to VB. Check http://www.einhugur.com, http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.com, …
3) A very helpful community, although I don’t say that this is not the case with Gambas. But RB had a lot of switchers lately from VB6.
4) Almost fully object oriented. (It lacks features like inheritance from multipe classes)
5) A very good interface with a good editor. The editor beats VB’s.
I’ve been programming with it for some time now. I’m very happy with it.
I downloaded the Beta already to run on a Linux box with it.
My 2 cents.
When it was essentially VB for the Mac. Though it’s changed since then, it’s pretty good. I think there many such cross platform RAD environments these days though. I prefer wxPython and PyQt myself.
Quote:
“Good to see that when an article is posted about some proprietary program, all the open source freaks feel compelled to make a post links to some other project that is *better* just because it is “free.””
Well, it was a comment on the announcement saying there is no competition, while the first post clearly proves that there is competition.
It has nothing to do with open source or free or whatever.
Only that the announcement isn’t entirely correct.
“Good to see that when an article is posted about some proprietary program, all the open source freaks feel compelled to make a post links to some other project that is *better* just because it is “free.” ”
I believe he said good AND free, not Good because its free.
Has anyone used Mono with Visual Basic.Net?
“Well, it was a comment on the announcement saying there is no competition, while the first post clearly proves that there is competition.”
well, a lack of good alternatives does NOT equal an absence or lack of competition. The rest of the quoted sentence (which was left out) also mentions a lack of desktop software for Linux… so should we start posting links to the hundreds of usable apps for Linux just to prove a marketing announcement wrong?
I took exception to his post because instead of commenting on the merits of or other observations about RealBASIC (which is what the article was about) he made the very first post just to point to some “free” project that tries to do somewhat of the same things. This is pretty common practice around sites like this though, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.
Excellent stuff. Compatibility is the name of the game. The easier it is the more software will be released for all platforms.
It IS still free for linux, right….
Either way Ive been using it and I feel its much better than gambas, easier to learn and program and if anything it will benefit those users of windows looking to linux for a real vb like experience. This will even convert your existing vb app to realbasic and hell its all free as in beer. I think its a huge plus for a propritary company to release something like this for free. Picture Microsoft doing the same.
“REALbasic 2005 for Linux Professional Edition is offered at a special introductory price of $399.95; list price is $499.95. All REALbasic 2005 for Linux licenses include six months of updates.”
With marketing that uses such superlative descriptions as that, how can I resist becoming a client? As it so happens, it’s not that hard.
Gambas is and isn’t comparable in that AFAIK its extant GUI implementations consists solely of a Qt backend. For proprietary development, paying for Qt licenses in order to write for an incompatible BASIC that doesn’t work on Windows is not a popular option, I’m sure. If you’re going to pay for development tools, REALbasic at least offers some portability.
That said, BASIC is a regrettable family of languages.
i never tried VB. is there any advantage over python/java/mono?
Looks nice! I will test it out on FC4 after I install it first
> i never tried VB. is there any advantage over python/java/mono?
not sure about python, which is great, but it surely is easier to learn BASIC (Beginners …) than java or mono – and what do you MEAN by ‘mono’, c# or vb.net or …?
basic is good for quick-and-dirty programming, easy to learn, and hugely popular in the real world and with the dark side 🙂 there are herds of VB programmers, only m$ decided to kill it by “upgrading” it to the not-compatible vb.net
if you want to learn basic, try to obtain an old quickbasic copy running on dos. old, yes, but it is a good start before turning to VB and others.
very good news
Jump that! Go to FreeBasic now, it’s as compatible with QBasic as is sencible and you can get it for Windows, Linux and even 32bit Dos (masochist!).
>I took exception to his post because instead of commenting on the merits of or other observations about RealBASIC (which is what the article was about) he made the very first post just to point to some “free” project that tries to do somewhat of the same things. This is pretty common practice around sites like this though, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.
Good goose and gravy! I posted that because the announcement is *entirely* innacurate, and because Gambas for some odd reason has taken a beating on this site simply because it isn’t Mono. Posting that it was free (as in beer and speech btw, unlike RealBasic) was an after thought and not the thrust of what I was saying at all.
>Gambas is and isn’t comparable in that AFAIK its extant GUI implementations consists solely of a Qt backend. For proprietary development, paying for Qt licenses in order to write for an incompatible BASIC that doesn’t work on Windows is not a popular option, I’m sure. If you’re going to pay for development tools, REALbasic at least offers some portability.
Not entirely correct. There is a GTK frontend for Gambas, though I haven’t used it myself and I don’t know what state it’s currently in. I believe there’s also some work being done on Windows port, but again, I don’t know much about that or how far along it is.
it will be interesting to see what the future of the os x version holds. i wonder if they will support ppc and intel as well or just drop os x support all together
They already stated they would support OS X on intel.
Are there any reviews of this in a real life situation. I could see my company using this for quick gui apps that need to be crossplatform.
My concern has always been deployment. I want to be able to build executables like what this supposedly does – hit 3 check boxes and you have linux, windows, and OSX executables built if you want.
Java, Python, Ruby, .NET/Mono all have the annoying runtime dependancy.
So any real life user experiences out there? What are the crossplatform quirks that it must have?
I certainly hope they improve the speed in the next beta. This isn’t going to cut it for development work unless that changes.
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
A clone of the best IDE RAD on the planet Delphi.
Real Basic is ok, but it’s no Delphi, and Lazarus is not bad.
Give Lazarus a try, it can create win32, OSX and Linux apps from the same source, and it pretty darn fast.
Is it the speed of the IDE or the executables? Was this windows, linux and what processor/memory of the system?
Don’t fall into this trap – don’t use a proprietary IDE and language that locks you in like Realbasic does. If you run into a bug or need a simple feature, it may be years before it is fixed or added. Meanwhile, you’ll keep shelling hundreds of dollars out every 6 months.
I’d recommend instead free and open source and extensible IDEs for other languages like java (netbeans, eclipse), mono/C#/VB.NET/boo/nemerle (sharpdevelop, monodevelop), python, and other basics like the previously mentioned gambas.
If you do want to shell out hundreds of dollars for some reason, then look also at options like X-Develop, TrollTech’s QT stuff, theKompany’s Rekall/BlackAdder stuff, Microsoft Visual Studio, etc.
The IDE… it’s been a long time since I’ve done any basic coding, but the IDE was dog slow. Not to mention I had menus going off the screen, and other visual bugs.
someone mentioned lazarus!
want a VERY easy to learn language, still plenty of power, and smart then pascal is the way to go… pascal SHOULD make a come back since it is a AWESOME language…
look at this snippit
program VARIABLESINTRO (output);
var number1: integer;
number2: integer;
begin
number1 := 34;
number2 := 43;
writeln( number1, ‘ + ‘, number2, ‘ = ‘, number1+number2 )
end.
How easy is that!
Write once, compile everywhere…….
I always try to go back to basic since that was always one of my favorites but it seems it has been turned into a complicated mess… IMO
Thanks for the advice. We’ll definitely be taking a closer look at this product.
I looked at Lazarus and couldn’t find it worked for OS X. Is there a sub-site or project by a different name that works for OS X?
I’m having problems finding binaries for OS X so if someone could help I’d love to play with it. TIA!
If it needs to be BASIC:
FreeBasic is freeware (Linux/Windows/DOS)
PureBasic is commercial (Windows/Linux/OSX/Amiga – around 60 bucks and free updates)
Both compile to assembler and are fast!
Already tried RealBasic for Windows a while ago and didn’t like it at all – the basic source code files have a proprietary format not ascii (look at the examples that come with it…) it’s like programming in Word and saving the files in doc format.
In 1995 it can be interesting. Now, IMHO Lazarus/FPC+ZEOS+LazReport is better combination for small applications (at this moment it is also beta), and Java or .NET/mono is better for larger apps. And this solutions are not based on BASIC language…
According to the history page the win32 api backend isn’t done yet – only the gtk+ backend.
I’ll say FP/Lazarus is comming along pretty nice…..
Just curious;
I ran across Phoenix Object Basic the other day. Noticed it is for Linux/Windows only. Does anyone have any experience with it?
Has anyone really tried it? I just downloaded it to my fc3 x86_64 and tried to run it and I get the following error:
<snip>
Runtime Error 4: Failed Assertion
Press OK to Continue
Press Cancel to Quit.
Please report what caused this error
along with the information below.
../Common/plugin.cpp: 6242
Failure Condition: 0
The application cannot continue because a needed file cannot be installed. /tmp/XbXtGWS: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied
</snip>
Doesn’t matter who I run it as, it fails. And the files are begin made in /tmp (and still hanging around).
I dont actually use lazarus, I was just glad to see lazarus get a lil interest thrown that way…
I use freepascal from freepascal.org, and I just a plain text editor tool that I am fond of. If I want a graphical toolkit then I use GTK.
IMO it is the easiest language to learn…
I made a form, put a button, an input box and a Html viewer component. Pressing Build – nothing happens. I waited and pressed again the REALbasic IDE disappeared. When I ran from terminal, I could see segfault errors.
Kbasic is also vb compatible.
drd,
I tried it on my FC3 box (I’m running the x86 distro, but have an AMD64 chip) and I got the same error as you.
I guess the thing to remember here is this is a BETA release. We’ll see how it shapes up in the next few months. Does anyone know how to report bugs?
How easy is this:
Private Sub Form_Load()
Dim number1 As Integer
Dim number2 As Integer
number1 = 34
number2 = 43
MsgBox number1 & “+” & number2 & “=” & number1 + number2
End Sub
I like Pascal, especially FreePascal. It has lots of good points, which you mention. And some bad points. Like unnecessary punctuation, begin/end ad nauseam, crippled switch.
Visual Basic also has lots of good points. Nice, clean, easy to read syntax is one of them. Quick development another. Fewer lines of code to get the same job done. And of course it has its downsides as well which have often been listed. Its incarnation in VB.NET made it neither fish nor fowl.
There is no one true language.
vb-write once compile everywhere? hmmm…
vb-does your compiler give you meaningful error statements usually with a suggestion how to correct the error?
“Nice, clean, easy to read syntax is one of them”
it has been a while since i did VB but i find pascal a lot more simple than VB. As a kid it was basic and then when i got back into programming a little I looked around and VB looked about as complicated as C or Java to me anyway, took a look at pascal and could “read” thru code and that was that!
Now if you come from programming or have been brought up in it then probably nothing seems easier than VB but I personally dont like having words in code that I cannot intuitively figure out since I do not code very much or very often I want easy to remember stuff.
what the heck does DIM mean? hard enough to remember what a integer is
pascal use to only have a few types but I think that has grown a bit too. And what about the Private isnt there a public and so much mors with VB is sort of a ‘when do i use this, when do i use that’ type of thing. for me at least 
Dont get me wrong, it may just be me. I am a bit dense sometimes… with most languages I have to keep a cheat sheet beside me to figure out all the brackets and indetions and how to do this and that, I havent needed that with pascal so I proclaim pascal is da BOMB!
http://www.matlus.com/scripts/website.dll/WhyDelphi
about sums it up for me
–Kudos to realbasic hope it tunrs into something awesome…
FC4 and I get the classic dependancy hell errors…
REALbasic 2005 Beta Linux]$ ./REALbasic2005Beta
./REALbasic2005Beta: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
REALbasic 2005 Beta Linux]$
isn’t it great that we can all have systems where we need 50,000 different versions of a lib?!@# I have libstdc++.so.6 – so much for backwards compat!
I’ve used RealBasic on MacOS X and developed programs with it.
I made an OpenGL demo with MP3s playing in the background. I also made a defender game and produced a binary under MacOS X for Win32.
Speaking of 3D, RealBasic has it’s own 3d extensions.
Nice to see it progressing. I’ll have to upgrade.
just make a copy of libstdc++.so.6 and rename it libstdc++.so.5
Actually a better way would be to make a symbolic link with:
ln -s libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.5
in /usr/lib, or wherever you have the lib if its in a different dir.
for combination of power, speed, portability, ease of use, code readability and manageability, pascal, particularly freepascal, gets to be the best candidate (if not the only one).
lazarus, on the other hand, is a great ide and component set for the language!
good point!
You post the quote about a professional edition that is $399, but fail to mention that the standard edition is free. Either you didn’t look very closely before deciding to comment or are just interested in spreading misleading information.