Realbasic

Realbasic (RB) is the object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Real Studio, a programming environment, developed and commercially marketed by Real Software, Inc of Austin, Texas for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, 32-bit x86 Linux and the web

Language features

Realbasic is a strongly typed language with minimal automatic type conversion, which supports single inheritance and interfaces, class methods and class properties, automatic memory management via reference counting, and operator overloading. A very important feature is the ability to extend (not just inherit from) existing classes, like Objective-C Categories. This considerably reduces the need for the Abstract Factory Pattern, which complicates using Application Frameworks in Java and C++. Realbasic also includes delegates, introspection, and namespace support, which allows modules to contain classes, interfaces and other modules.

Framework features

As described in the language reference, its built-in framework supports (Real Software 2011) :

• dictionaries,
• declarations to external libraries (dll, dylib)
• Visual Basic datatypes compatibility,
• full Unicode support,
• regular expressions,
• application programming interface calls to compiled C libraries on all supported platforms,
• ActiveX and basic OLE support (on Windows); COM objects are supported,
• Notification icons (on Windows),
• Windows registry (on Windows),
• cooperative threads,
• scripting language embedded in Realbasic programs through RBScript,
• XML parsing and generation,
• console and service application support (Professional & Enterprise editions only)
• Apple events (on Mac),
• Keychain (on Mac),
• Spotlight (on Mac),
• QuickTime (on Mac and Windows),
• sound,
• real-time 3D graphics,
• serial communications,
• sockets (both TCP, UDP and IPC),
• SSL (Professional edition only),
• HTTP, POP3, SMTP and SOAP

The framework functionality can also be extended by creating plugins using the Plugin SDK provided by Real Software. Plugins are created using C/C++ with a variety of supported compilers, including Xcode, Microsoft Visual Studio and gcc. Plugins can support any platform Realbasic supports, but are not required to support all platforms.

Example code

This example writes to a new text file:

Dim t as TextOutputStream
Dim f as FolderItem
f=GetSaveFolderItem(FileTypes1.Text,"Create Example.txt")
If f <> Nil then
 t=TextOutputStream.Create(f)
 t.WriteLine(TextField1.text)
 t.Close
End if

This example draws a triangle in a Canvas control. It is placed in the Paint event. The parameter g as Graphics is passed into this event:

Dim Points() as Integer
Points=Array(10,10,100,50,10,200,10,10)
g.ForeColor=RGB(100,200,255)
g.FillPolygon Points

The following code creates an internal database and uses SQLExecute to create a table:

Dim db as REALSQLdatabase
Dim f as FolderItem
Dim result as Boolean
f=New FolderItem("mydb")
db=New REALSQLdatabase
db.databaseFile=f
result=db.CreateDatabaseFile
If db.Connect() then
 db.SQLExecute("create table invoices(id integer,Cust_ID integer,Amount double, Date date)")
 db.Commit
else
 MsgBox "Database not created"
end if

See also

• RBScript - related scripting language

Comparable Basic Dialects

• Gambas - a free approach to object basic
• Visual Basic

Other Programming Languages

• Comparison of programming languages

External links

• Real Software