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Welcome to RBDevZone! This blog is about all things Real Studio, my favorite development environment. Please take a moment to look around; I'm sure you'll find something useful!
REAL Software has created a Flickr group for pictures from REAL World 2008. Check them all out here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/realworld/pool/
And you have pictures, be sure to add them to the Flickr group as well!
This is me during the keynote:
For #30, an extra-large Current Notes!
CalendarKit 2.0 beta – Now integrates with Outlook
Yuma – Develop web apps using REALbasic!
Toringo Plugins – Plugins for encryption and DRM
On-Target Reports 5.0.3 – Bug fixes
gZip plugin – Now open-source
Notebook TabPanel – It’s a notepad and a tab!
Extended Plugin 3.3 – Extend your numeric precision
Inline HTTP (and more) – From Adam Shirey
Trivial Client-Server Example – From Charles’ presentation at REAL World
Some warnings about pre-emptive threads – From Alacatia Labs
ListBox Hover Cell – A useful tip
MacMod Interview with Andrew Bredlow – A video interview from MacWorld
REAL World Recap – Thoughts from Bob Keeney
REAL World Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 – From Kevin Cully
REAL World Day 1 and Recap – Norman gives his insight
REAL Word Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 – From Brad Rhine
REAL World thoughts – From Jay Jennings
Self and Me – Steve Garman gives you some tips for when to use these two keywords
Introspection and Caching – More insight from Aaron
On Wednesday night, everyone walked down to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema for a somewhat strange event, at least for me. This place is a movie theatre that serves food and comedy all while showing a movie. I told you it was strange.
The movie was the 80′s classic 
Back to the Future. The comedy was 3 fellows commenting and generally making fun of it in the same vein as the old show Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
Their comments during the movie were gut-busting funny. I laughed a lot. They did a live comedy bit as an intermission in the middle of the movie, but I just it found to be more strange than funny. What was that little guy continuously jumping up and down?
The food was OK and nothing to write home about. Although they did have some organic root beer from Maine, which I had to try. It was quite good, but who knew that Maine exported root beer? Especially to Texas?
I can’t say I liked this event all that much. It’s kind of hard to talk with other conference-goers during a movie so it didn’t make for a good networking event.
Thursday night was the 2nd annual dinner and trivia contest held at the Omni. The Omni prepares absolutely wonderful food and this was no exception. The trivia content involved answering odd pop-culture questions. It might have been cooler if the questions were all REALbasic-related. But then I’m a geek…
I didn’t win anything 
My question was “What was the 8th and final fight club rule in Fight Club“. I have never seen fight club so I had no idea.
Prizes included REALbasic books, shirts, store discounts and some other things. A lot of people won and everyone seemed to have a great time.
I didn’t attend a lot of sessions this year. A good amount of sessions were repeats from prior years or beginner-level. But that’s OK, because it gave me plenty of time to chat with other people and do the “networking” thing. I got and handed out lots of business cards 
Obviously, I attended the sessions for which I was presenting These were:
This session was very well attended and I think it went well. The sessions were all about an hour long, so I try to break my presentation up with 20 minutes of slides, 20 minutes of REALbasic code demos and 20 minutes of group discussion. That worked really well for this session. I got to give an overview of unit testing in general, show how to use RBUnit wth REALbasic and then had lots of good discussion from everyone.
Afterwards, Joe and I talked about some updates for RBUnit to allow it to run automatically when your app starts and only display the UI if there are failures. I think this is a great idea and something I’m going to look into.
Also, Chris Little’s team at Renaissance Learning updated RBUnit to use delegates (replacing RBScript). He provided me with the code, so I’m going to take a look at that as well. I’m not too familiar with delegates, but it they might be a good alternative for introspection especially for those that are no yet using REALbasic 2008.
This session was well attended, primarily with folks new to REALbasic and REAL World. In fact, there were a lot of new folks at REAL World this year, which is a very good thing.
I covered what I do as community evangelist and then talked about the plethora of places on the internet where you can go to get information. Then we switched to Safari and actually checked a lot of the sites.
In addition, have created a new Community page here at RBDevZone for these community links.
I’ll be continuing to update this with more links as I find them so be sure to check back often!
Surprisingly, this session was not well attended. I thought there would be a lot of people that might be interested in this, but it seems I was wrong. Anyway, I pretty much gave an overview similar to the article about this that I wrote for REALbasic Developer Magazine. I then switched to a demo of VBConvert! by AYB Computers. The people there seemed generally interested in both the tool and the topic, so we had some good discussions as well.
I did attend a few other sessions as well. On Wednesday, Brad Rhine‘s Cross-Platform Interface Tips was interesting and I picked up a couple things.
On Thursday, I attended two of Marco Bambini’s sessions on REAL SQL Server: Packaging REAL SQL Server in Your Apps and New Features in REAL SQL Server 2008 Release 2. Both were filled with lots of useful information. The next version of REAL SQL Server appears to be a very significant upgrade in both features and performance improvements.
I also attended Jonathan Monroe’s session on using ODBC with REALbasic. I knew that the a lot of new features had been added to the ODBC plugin in the past year or so, but it was good to see some practical examples for how they might be used.
On Friday, I (and most everyone else, it seemed) went to Brad and Joe’s session on Yuma. Yuma looks incredibly cool and I’ll be writing a separate blog post about it later. The last session of the day I attended was Nathan Regener’s Build Process session. Nathan is the build engineer for REAL Software. He was very funny and open about REALbasic build processes. He showed us all how they are using continuous integration (very cool) and talked about both general topics and specific things he would like to change. Such transparency is always appreciated and I think it helps create a better connection with the community.
I’m taking a break now, but here’s my summary of the first day of REAL World 2008 so far…
The morning started with Geoff’s keynote. I did some Twitter about this, which you can read here.
Geoff recapped some of the new features that have been added to REALbasic in the past year and then talked some about new features in REAL SQL Server and REALbasic.
It seems like 2008 will be the “year of the database” for REAL Software. REAL SQL Server will get some substantial improvements, including something called “Lifesaver” which is kind of like Time Machine for your database. It allows you to undo any command that was run against the database at any point. The server will also have automated support for multi-version concurrency control. Essentially that is a long way of saying that it will have better performance when access by concurrent users.
Also, REAL SQL Server will allow you to create plugins to add your own SQL language features or to incorporate business logic on the server. Geoff did not mention if these plugins can be written in REALbasic, but I would doubt it. I’ll have to remember to ask him…
The last feature that was mentioned for REAL SQL Server was client messaging which is a way for the server to send messages back to the clients that are connected to it.
On the REALbasic front, Geoff showed two future features, both related to databases. The first is the ability to adjust the source for a database connection in the properties. This allows you to target a local development database while developing and to then switch to a production REAL SQL Server database when building a release. A very neat feature that makes adding the database to the project much more useful than it has been.
Even better, for me, is that REALbasic will now have automatically create classes to map to your database tables. The new connection object can be expanded to show these classes and you can modify them as you wish to add calculated field (aka methods). This is incredibly powerful and will make creating database applications even easier than they are now. I can’t wait to see when these new features show up.
After Geoff, Brad Weber and Joe Strout got up on stage and announced a new product they have built called Yuma. Yuma is essentially a way to create dynamic web applications using REALbasic syntax. It works like PHP in that you embed your code directly in the HTML page. But it uses actual REALbasic code and is compiled so it’s much faster than PHP. This looks like an amazing product, which you can download at http://www.yumadev.com. It’s also reasonably priced. You can use it for free for small deployments that use the development server or you can purchases the enterprise version, which integrates with Apache, for $149. It’s in beta now, but they expect to ship as early as next month!
Next was my “Software Made Simple” presentation. It went very well and I finished with 2 minutes to spare. I’ve had countless people tell me afterwards that they really liked it and got a lot out of it, which is always nice to hear.
Dave and Jay did their presentations after me. I was still in a bit of a daze from finishing my presentation, so I didn’t get all of Dave’s, but he is a good presenter. Jay talked about ways to build software for profit and had some good case studies and examples.
After the keynote, we broke for lunch which consisted of very yummy fajitas and some rather spicy tortilla soup.