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Programming IT Technology

REALbasic Linux IDE Public Beta Available 88

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-all-seems-so-basic dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A brand-new visual development environment for Linux is in public beta now. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be available for free when it ships in August. The company has also done away with their email registration requirement. Download the public beta now from REAL Software."
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REALbasic Linux IDE Public Beta Available More

REALbasic Linux IDE Public Beta Available

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  • If you'd rather have a look first... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mogrify ( 828588 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @11:16AM (#12814064) Homepage
    http://realsoftware.com/products/ [realsoftware.com]

    • Re:If you'd rather have a look first... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Leroy_Brown242 ( 683141 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @11:21AM (#12814140) Homepage Journal
      Where is your faith?

      Slashdot says download, so you download!
    • Thanks. I can't believe the editors would be lazy enough to not only post a direct-download link, but also not add an information link. I hate when sites do that because it feels like they're cramming some new software down my throat when I'd rather read up on it first.
      • And, it doesn't benefit REAL much to have a presumably multi-megabyte file downloaded left and right for everyone coming from slashdot, rather than the 100 KB or so worth of website where they could decide if downloading this was something they wanted to do. Elsewhere it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but having a multi-MB file by the link in a /. article is asking is a good way of trying to get REALsoftware.com slashdotted.

        by the way, REALbasic is really awesome. I've not used the new Linux or Windows hos

  • I can hardly wait... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PixelCat ( 58491 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @11:22AM (#12814153)
    for the cognitive dissonance to set in. Linux and BASIC together.
    • While a slick desktop would help the quick adoption of Linux, being able to EASILY and quickly write ad hoc business applications from within linux will help more. The fact that you can write your apps using the Windows, Mac, or Linux IDE and then target all of the same will allow a company to make a gradual shift as well instead of balking at an all-or-nothing choice. Put this product right alongside Firefox and OpenOffice as tools that could seriously undermine the future hegemony of Microsoft on the busi
      • ...people who are barely able to understand the concept of good programming practices having access to a tool which supports none of these. Then let them produce, with ease, the shoddy, buggy programs to enable Linux to challenge Microsoft for the honor of crappiest computing platform.

        Face it, business analysts and venture capitalists: Programming, if not an art, is certainly a skill which takes a certain level of talent and expertise to be competent. If you're competent, you'll learn it. If not, you sho

        • At this point in the game, with environments like java, mono, and python, there is no reason to introduce a flawed language like BASIC into the mainstream.

          There's no *reason* to introduce Linux into the mainstream either, for that matter. But a quick and dirty programming environment allowing marginal programmers to make adequate apps today is good. And for an elite programmer like you, it's even better because when these marginal apps need to be upgraded to something "real" then you have a client who p

        • Re:Yeah, this is what we want... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Electrum ( 94638 ) <david@acz.org> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @02:08PM (#12816199) Homepage
          ...people who are barely able to understand the concept of good programming practices having access to a tool which supports none of these

          Nice FUD [realsoftware.com]:
          REALbasic 2005 is a modern, object-oriented language and environment, so C++ developers feel right at home. Familiar concepts such as polymorphism, object references and exception handling are supported with a clean, modern syntax.
          You can write bad code in any language. However, REALbasic fully supports good programming practices.

        • Re:Yeah, this is what we want... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @02:34PM (#12816486) Journal
          Every once in a while I forget why I hate software developers so much and then I read a post like this and remember, it's because so many of them are such arrogant fucktards who are convinced that because they sat through a bunch of brain-hammeringly dull CS courses that they somehow have become members of God's own IT elite.

          True story: I used to work for a major internet retailer as a UNIX systems engineer/administrator. This major internet retailer, named after a large river, had a warehouse in Seattle. The warehouse operations manager was a very smart cookie, not a programmer or developer, but still very smart. One day this manager needed a tool to check shipment status, he requested this from the software developers, but they were too busy wanking over "good programming practices" (whatever those are, from a plurality of the developers I've worked with it seems that their good practices are "overpromise and underdeliver", "blame the hardware" and avoid being oncall if at all possible) to develop this for him. So this warehouse operations manager went and got himself a PERL book and sat down and wrote a tool that did what he wanted it to do.

          When the software developers found out about this they were aghast. Aaaaacccckkkk! Someone other them then writing a tool, a member of the unwashed actually coding, God forbid! Of course the developers found a lot to bitch about in his tool, it wasn't very good PERL they said, it ran out of his home directory, it beat the shit out of the database and our NetApp filers, etc, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda. But all of them missed one point, if they had gotten off of their asses and used all of the good programming practices that developers keep nattering on about to develop the tool he requested he wouldn't have had to sit down and write this thing (which really wasn't that bad, he had followed the style that most PERL books use in their example code). If they had done their jobs he wouldn't have had to do theirs (as well as his).

          Of course I worked with lots and lots of people who called themselves software developers who wrote code that pounded our systems to their knees by running full table scans against databases, writing vital log files to a directory that was NFS mounted from a personal Linux workstation, leaking memory, running out of control and pegging the CPU, etc, etc, etc, etc, and they were writing most of their code in C and C++, those darling languages of those who call themselves professional software developers.

          I guess what I'm trying to say is "go fuck yourself you arrogant prick!" You're not as smart as you think you are. You're not as good of a programmer as you think you are and you obviously know nothing about REALBasic (it ain't GWbasic or even Vbasic) and if it helps users get their job done then it's a good thing in my book, even if it isn't in yours.

          • Ya know... You are right. The problem is that young developers tend to want to treat everything as a wrench. But hopefully, sometime in the career of those developers, they will realize that bicycles are for the sidewalk and cars are for the road. A car has a high cost, but can go fast. If you try to use it on a sidewalk, its likely to get stuck since its too wide. Vice versa, a bicycle would not be good on the expressway because its not fast enough

            It sounds like the operations manager wanted a bicyc

            • It sounds like the operations manager wanted a bicycle and the IT department responded with, "We can't afford to buy you a car right now."

              The thing is, if you rush out an app just to "get it done", it can become a maintenance nightmare that nags the developers long after it was written and the developer gets blame. That perl example mentioned might run, but it may not be easy to maintain. I once tried to perform changes on a spreadsheet with VBA macros built by a power user, and it was peice of crap. It
          • multiplexo,

            Lie down here and tell me about your mother...
          • It's a friday, so I'll bite on the flamebait. Being a developer for a number of years now, I'll admit that there are a lot of prima donna developers, and people who use tools solely because they're cool. But, it's ironic that you call programmers "arrogant fucktards" when system administrators can be some of the biggest hurdles to developers getting things done (or, "speedbump on the road to success" if you prefer). True anecdotes:
            • You need this software installed? Sorry, it's not on the approved list and
          • Settle down their buddy. It's true the parent did come off as an arrogant ass, but his point echoes what a lot of others think. For many years now developers have been waiting for basic to die, even though it "supports good programming practices" it certainly doesn't encourage them. With the introduction of C# most of us thought visualbasic was on it's way out and we'd finally be free of basic family languages.

            I have no doubt the realsoftware people are extremely talented but i'm pretty sure i'm not the on
        • Let's keep the good programming statements in perspective. I like linux, and use it regularly but it still has its own share of problems, with abscence good programming being one of them.
          Linux applications are not usually known for good programming.
          • What about the millions of shell scripts that are just bad by virtue of being scripted into existance?
          • Have you seen the innerworkings of some of these linux applications. They are not (for the most part) examples of good programming.
          • Poor documentation (ye
        • ...people who are barely able to understand the concept of good programming practices having access to a tool which supports none of these. Then let them produce, with ease, the shoddy, buggy programs to enable Linux to challenge Microsoft for the honor of crappiest computing platform.

          we talking about RealBASIC, or gcc here?

          And besides, people writing crappy apps is no reason not to allow those who will write superlative ones to have such easy to use tools at their disposal. Where is the logic in that?
        • Well basic was very important for Microsoft. Linux should become more accesible to more people if it wishes to compete. Not every programmer is as good but not every program has to be very good. For RAD these tools are very capable. Personally I loved how fast you could build an application in MS Access. To each its own
  • Yes, it's a lot like VB, and yes, it's very, very odd, but it's an extremely useful programming tool. Recommended to anyone who needs quick and dirty cross-platform work.

  • Good News (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is good news.

    A while back I wrote to the Realbasic sales that they should offer another cheaper linux product -- one that allowed you to make binaries that required a valid Realbasic runtime. Thus, you might pay $50 or $100 for a compiler and IDE, but anyone else who wanted to run your code would also have to pay $50 or $100. I suggested to them that this would better allow hobbiests to build up a set of useful code that would make Real Basic much more desireable. I don't think they understood what
    • and realized that wasn't a good idea. I'm not going to pay $100 to run some hobbyist's code. If he wants to sell it to me direct, that might be another story, but to get a hobbyist's program that requires I shell out $100 to someone else is a non-started.

      VB took off because the system would package all the necessary stuff into one installer. If the realbasic system would compile into 3 installers (mac/linux/windows) that'd be very handy. I'd certainly shell out $50 to be able to write and distribute cr

      • Re:They understood (Score:3, Informative)

        by Electrum ( 94638 )
        If the realbasic system would compile into 3 installers (mac/linux/windows) that'd be very handy.

        It does, if you get the professional [realsoftware.com] version:

        REALbasic Professional Edition lets you create software for Windows, Linux and Macintosh from a single code base.

        I'd certainly shell out $50 to be able to write and distribute cross-platform gui apps.

        It's more expensive than that, but well worth it considering that it's the only easy to use, cross platform development environment that creates native, single e

        • Yep,
          it's $100 for the "standard edition" [realsoftware.com] and $400 for the "professional edition" [realsoftware.com]. For what I would use this for I doubt I would care $300 worth about the pro features(sql plugin, better debugger, good autoinstaller).

          I played with the RealBasic demo back in OS8, but I haven't tried it in recent history.
  • Is there a debian package I could try? Otherwise, it's probably not worth the time.
    • > Is there a debian package I could try? Otherwise, it's probably not worth the
      > time.

      Your experience has shown you that software for which debian packages aren't available is generally not worth installing, or you can't be bothered to try what you appreciate could be an awesome piece of code? Windows users say the same thing about Linux, btw...

  • When are they gonna learn? (Score:3, Informative)

    by VStrider ( 787148 ) <giannis_mz@NOSPAm.yahoo.co.uk> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @12:49PM (#12815138)
    Ok, I read the product description, saw the screenshots, and it looked like a really nice IDE. I know its proprietary and all, but I was eager to try it, even though since I moved to C/C++ I haven't touched VB for years. Anyway, the download finished, and I started the app.

    Then all of a sudden the app reminded me why I don't like proprietary software. A window pops up asking me for a licence or key with an option to continue on the demo. I chose this one.
    "Retrieving Demo key..." comes up...and I wait..."The key could not be retrieved cause the server timed out". Tried again to no avail. The software refused to start, so I happilly removed it from my disk.

    the server was probably /.ed but why do I need to retrieve a key for a demo product is beyond me. All they managed to do is annoy people who thought of trying their product.

    If you didn't want us to try your demo, then why do you advertise it on slashdot?
    If you did want us to try it, then why do you feel you need to fortify your demo with licence keys?

    You want your demo to reach as many people as possible, and this is just not going to happen. Good luck with your bussiness model, you'll need it.

    • Re:When are they gonna learn? (Score:4, Informative)

      by gellenburg ( 61212 ) <george@ellenburg.org> on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @06:12PM (#12818758) Homepage Journal
      As someone who was part of the RB'2005 beta program I can at least explain to you why you have to get a key from the server. ;-)

      The linux version is a PUBLIC BETA. Expect new (beta) releases quite often.

      Each demo key (which is really a beta key) has a finite expiration period and once it expires will not be renewed. This is to encourage you to always be running the latest version when you report problems.

      As someone who has just upgraded to RB'2005 Professional for the Mac today, I *can* assure you that your actual license does NOT expire.

      Also, you may receive different licenses depending on what testing is occuring. Standard features as opposed to Pro features, etc.
      • Hey! Shut up, you! He hates proprietary software! It is teh sux0r! And don't you forget it!

        The time he lost waiting for the license to be retrieved probably more than makes up for the time of chasing down one goofed up pointer in a C++ app... *shrug*
  • Gambas is an easy and free software IDE with BASIC:
    http://gambas.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
  • $ ldd REALbasic2005Beta | grep found

    libcups.so.2 => not found

    Some of us don't have a damn printer, you know, and don't want or need one...

    *grumble grumble emerge cups bitch moan*

  • People are not happy with this release. (Score:3, Informative)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @10:30AM (#12823793)
    There has been very negative discussion [talkaboutprogramming.com] of RB 2005 at the comp.lang.basic.realbasic newsgroup. There are many people who aren't happy about the path that has been taken. The new "development environment-as-a-web browser" paradigm they embraced falls flat on its face, according to some. And there have been scathing suggestings that RB 2005 has lost all of the uniqeness REALbasic'ers were used to in the past. Now it's just a lousy Visual Basic clone, according to some.

    • Haha. I was one of the beta testers. I don't send bug reports on obvious things like "Can't open new project", etc. Every few months I would download a new beta and play with it. I would quickly come to the conclusion that 1) The bugs are too obvious to report on, and 2) This thing is not yet at a point where it would be a productive environment.

      Well, to make a long story short, I decided it was not at a point of being productive a few weeks before they shipped the "final" version. I highly doubt the

      • If it weren't for those other reports of such blatant misfunctionality, I don't think I would believe what you wrote (not that I mistrust you, personally). I have to wonder how they plan for this project to be successful, especially if they are alienating all of their existing users, and most likely not impressing any of the new ones.

      • Re:People are not happy with this release. (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Really not hard to see why you got kicked out of their beta program - you've missed the entire point. There is no such thing as a bug that is "too obvious to report on". Did it never occur to you that, perhaps, those bugs that seemed "obvious" to you might have been anything but to someone else? Different people use different pieces of software in different ways. I'm a developer, and I can't tell you how many times I've gotten bug reports where people described ways of using the software that seemed complet
        • Ok, Aaron, I disagreed with you the first time you gave that lame excuse. I've been in the situation that your company has put its developers in. "We're sending your code to QA because we've got a deadline, despite the fact that they are just going to report stuff that you are most certainly aware of." Aaron; please ask your management to listen to its developers, and other developers that volunteer to assist you with your product for free. We KNOW what we are talking about.

        • ooops... lets try this again...

          Ok, Aaron, I disagreed with you the first time you gave that lame excuse. I've been in the situation that your company has put its developers in. "We're sending your code to QA because we've got a deadline, despite the fact that they are just going to report stuff that you are most certainly aware of, even though it just further slows down the development process."

          Aaron; please ask your management to listen to its developers, and other developers that volunteer to assist yo

  • How come there is not a working VB-like OSS project? I am not complaining here, just wondering why the top selling development product (for good or bad) has not generated interest in similar OSS project? What are the forces and trends behind this odd disconnect?

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