Saturday, August 06, 2005

RealSoftware's REALBasic 2005 -- the popular cross-platform interactive development environment (IDE) for Mac OS X and Windows -- is scheduled to debut for the Linux platform later this month, perhaps as early as the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep each night to the glow of beta versions of REALBasic 2005 running happily on SUSE Pro 9.3 on my monitor.

REALBasic 2005 is nothing like the Basic I used to know ... The language these days is thoroughly modern and object-oriented: it's all objects, properties, methods, and classes.

REALBasic is a powerful language with an equally powerful IDE. It is also a proprietary, closed software product, but you can develop free software with it. That means the source code and the executable of any apps you build with REALBasic can be freely distributed, without restriction. Or if you like, you can build freeware, shareware, or legacy proprietary apps with it. There are no restrictions, no royalties, and no runtime required.