mbokil
6th August 2005, 05:01 PM
For a while now I have been doing most of my Linux GUI development using Gecko, XUL and Firefox in the form of extensions.
I was reading a review on RealBasic 5 for Linux and I downloaded the beta linux binary. I was really impressed by the IDE. It was amazing how easy it was to create small GTK applications. As a test I wrote a small application that made a call to the unix shell and executed 'gnome-terminal'. It took about 5 minutes to make this application. I dragged out a GTK button object, double-clicked it to open the code editor and then used the visual basic command Shell.exectue("gnome-terminal").
What really blew me away was that I saw an icon for adding a database connection. I clicked the MySQL button in RealBasic and added the name of the database, host, user, and password. I then dragged out a text field object and created a simple loop to display all the fields in a test table. About 30 minutes later I had a simple GTK UI for displaying my MySQL tables! All the complexitiy of creating GTK widgets was abstracted into a drag and drop user interface.
The binaries REALBasic creates are real machine compiled files that are GPL'd so you could package them up in a RPM for inclusion in Fedora. RealBasic 5 is a very cool RAD framework. I noticed the IDE has options to show how your UI will look in Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and older Mac systems. While I haven't tried this yet, their documentation claims the RealBasic linux files can be opened in the Windows or Mac OSX RealBasic IDE and compiled into native code for those operating systems. Wild stuff.
I think instead of messing around with Python and GTK for quick GUI applications I am going to be using RealBasic from now on. It is kind of funky using BASIC again. I was expecting '10 Print Hello World; 20 goto 10' -- what I saw instead was a complete object oriented language with a simple syntax and premade objects for accessing GTK/Windows/OSX windowing objects.
The documentation for a beta version is excellent. Download the tutorial and language reference as PDF files. Check out the free download for the Linux version: http://realbasic.com/download/linux/
-mark
I was reading a review on RealBasic 5 for Linux and I downloaded the beta linux binary. I was really impressed by the IDE. It was amazing how easy it was to create small GTK applications. As a test I wrote a small application that made a call to the unix shell and executed 'gnome-terminal'. It took about 5 minutes to make this application. I dragged out a GTK button object, double-clicked it to open the code editor and then used the visual basic command Shell.exectue("gnome-terminal").
What really blew me away was that I saw an icon for adding a database connection. I clicked the MySQL button in RealBasic and added the name of the database, host, user, and password. I then dragged out a text field object and created a simple loop to display all the fields in a test table. About 30 minutes later I had a simple GTK UI for displaying my MySQL tables! All the complexitiy of creating GTK widgets was abstracted into a drag and drop user interface.
The binaries REALBasic creates are real machine compiled files that are GPL'd so you could package them up in a RPM for inclusion in Fedora. RealBasic 5 is a very cool RAD framework. I noticed the IDE has options to show how your UI will look in Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and older Mac systems. While I haven't tried this yet, their documentation claims the RealBasic linux files can be opened in the Windows or Mac OSX RealBasic IDE and compiled into native code for those operating systems. Wild stuff.
I think instead of messing around with Python and GTK for quick GUI applications I am going to be using RealBasic from now on. It is kind of funky using BASIC again. I was expecting '10 Print Hello World; 20 goto 10' -- what I saw instead was a complete object oriented language with a simple syntax and premade objects for accessing GTK/Windows/OSX windowing objects.
The documentation for a beta version is excellent. Download the tutorial and language reference as PDF files. Check out the free download for the Linux version: http://realbasic.com/download/linux/
-mark
