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?
$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 2013, REALbasic is now known as Xojo (the language is still the same, though).