Mini-Review: REALbasic 2006r4

Summary: best Windows GUI development system around, standard library is a little thin.

I've been using RB (the Pro version) for about a year now, and I have to say that it's hands down the best GUI development system you'll ever come across for Windows. That's it. Go buy it now. I'll wait.

A little more detail? Alright. The latest versions of Visual Basic.NET and Netbeans both have comparable GUI editors, and to be fair their GUI toolkits (.NET and Java Swing respectively) are both richer than RB's (more controls, etc.). So you couldn't be faulted for choosing either alternative. I use both myself. But if you're looking for something that you can hammer out in an afternoon and email to Mom, you can't beat REALbasic.

I really enjoy using RB for GUI development, which has never been my strong suit. Coming from an embedded background, most of my coding's at the console level in C, C++, or Lua. Sure, I can usually put something together in wxWidgets, FLTK, Swing or TkInter, but it tends to be a little on the homely side. It works, but man is it ugly.

RB makes it difficult to create an ugly GUI. Just like Netbeans' Matisse or good ol' Visual Basic, the GUI editor offers guidelines as you drag and drop components on the window. I find RB's GUI editor to be a little more nimble than its competition, however. It's painless and quick, and so I find myself tending to align components as I create them, worrying about the presentation of the user interface. It's almost like you'd have to go out of your way to make it ugly.

Where REALbasic falls behind is in the depth of its standard library, the classes, functions, etc. that come pre-canned with RB. It's got the basics to be sure, but if you're coming from .NET or Java you'll feel naked without all that extra support. Personally, I consider this almost a blessing-it's a lot easier to wrap your brain around a compact library. You'll be up to speed faster than in other development environments. Still, I'd really like to see the image formats supported beefed up-only BMP and PNG files are natively supported in Windows. You could install QuickTime for all the rest, but I don't see that as a selling point.

Of course, you could always write your own extensions to RB to support whatever functionality you require, but that isn't always an option. The good news is that each new release of RB tends to have more "goodies" for your development pleasure.

The Pro version offers cross-compilation (write on any of Mac, Win, Linux, and deploy on all three) as well as a few extra niceties. The niceties aren't anything you couldn't code yourself given time and effort, but for many it's worth the price difference to just have them available.

And speaking of deployment, it's dead easy. REALbasic creates a single self-contained app (no DLLs!), and you're done. I haven't tried RB on the Mac yet (possibly due to the fact that I don't have one), but I can confirm that the Linux version is equally painless. When I have to develop one-offs at work, I can't tell you how great it is to just email a single file and know it'll just work without knowing a thing about the user's machine.

All in all I can't recommend REALbasic highly enough. Some developers might feel constrained by the shallow standard library, but all of the building blocks to "roll your own" are there.