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Feature
It's Alive! It's 5.5!
What's New in the Latest Version of REALbasic
Issue: 2.4 (March/April 2004)
Author: Matt Neuburg
Author Bio: Matt Neuburg is the author of REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, and a member of the editorial board of REALbasic Developer.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 10,135
Starting Page Number: 16
RBD Number: 2410
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Excerpt of article text...
The white-coated folks in REAL's laboratory have been tinkering for a year since the last major version (5.0), and the results are impressive. Here's a survey of the main changes to expect in REALbasic 5.5. (The standard disclaimers apply: I'm describing the latest beta available at the time of writing, but things could change while we go to print; and, no animals were harmed during the production of this article.)
The Big Picture
REAL has started to implement building Linux applications (RedHat and SuSE, initially); I've no direct experience of this, but I'm told that the effort is still largely inicipient. There's no Linux IDE, either; you develop on Mac or Windows, just as in the old days you could develop for Windows only on Mac. But cross-platform development is easier than before, because now there's remote debugging.
Here's how remote debugging works. Let's say you've two machines (which we'll think of as local and remote). They can be running different operating systems: for example, Mac OS X locally and Windows remotely. On the remote machine, you run a server app called the stub. On the local machine, you run the REALbasic IDE, and you tell it where the stub is (on a local network, it will discover the stub automatically). Now you develop locally as usual, but when you want to run in the IDE, instead of Debug > Run, you choose Debug > Run Remotely. Presto, REALbasic builds for the appropriate platform and, by talking to the stub, copies the built app to the remote machine and launches it! Human interaction with the running app takes place on the remote machine, but the debugger, if we drop into it, appears on the local machine. Thus the edit-run-debug cycle is extremely convenient when cross-compiling; it also avoids window refresh issues that can arise when editing and debugging on the same machine.
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