REALbasic 2006 release 4 out!

100,000 REALbasic Developers Gain Fast Path to Intel Support

Release 4 was ... released yesterday. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. The big feature of this release is that RB now supports the Universal Binaries for the Mac OS X which means that applications developed in RB will run wicked fast both on Intel and PowerPC Macs. Before, the applications would need to run inside of Rhapsody to run on an Intel based Mac, and performance suffered. I'm not a Mac guy but I can see where this would be of major importance to keep up the industry. RB claims that it will be twice as fast as before on Intel platforms. Congratulations REALSoftware on this release!

So, being that I'm interested in Windows and Linux, what's in this release for me? Plenty.

Already, in RB, it does type checking on variables at compile time. This is a huge time saver over my Visual Foxpro development as this catches most of the bugs that I introduce. I mistakenly will be passing a string when the method is expecting an integer. Foxpro doesn't catch this until run time. RB caught this at compile time. With release 4 (R4), they now allow for "check for errors" without compiling. I guess this is "compiling - light". Very cool. Compiling didn't take that long but it will be a nice addition.

I've been waiting for years to hear the words "we've done away with the 2 Gig limit". Unfortunately, I was waiting to hear those words from Microsoft in regards to Foxpro DBF tables. I'm still waiting. Well, RB has overcome this limitation with their files. Let's give up a cheer for the mantra "No Limits!" I'm sure that OS limitations still apply but they don't need to be built into the development platform.

Evidently there are also over 100 bug fixes as well. I'm hoping that this leads to a more stable development platform on Linux. I would get an occasional error on Linux where the entire environment disappears. RB recovers pretty easily but it was annoying.

Anyway, I can't wait to give it a spin. I promise, (PROMISE!) to do some screencasts on RB soon. Yes, I'm a newbie, but lots of people at FoxForward were asking me about RB. I'd love to do a "RB for Fox Folk" series of screencasts similar to what Ed Leafe and Paul McNette have done for Dabo/Python. I'm still very excited about RB as an excellent alternative to Visual FoxPro. Stay tuned and give RB a spin!