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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!
-- Paul Lefebvre (LogicalVue Software, Inc.)
REAL World: Day 1, The Keynote
Posted by 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.
I quite enjoyed your presentation. It was a good reminder that you really need to focus on your target audience when building software and that we as developers are rarely part of that target audience.
On the Yuma project: There was a similar web server with RbScript-like (in place of PHP) a few years ago made by some french programmers. So, Yuma is not new, but possibly better executed. I sincerely hope it’s not vanishing as its now-forgotten predecessor (which was pretty nice, IMO).
Nice job this morning, Paul. It’s useful to be reminded of things we can all too easily forget. Also a good reminder that simplicity can be deceptively hard to achieve.
I couple of guys and I were also working on the same kind of thing:
http://rbgazette.com/?p=191
I see you can no longer download Arbee, which is kind of a shame. We never released the version that had RbScript support, but we had progressed pretty far along with it.
“But it uses actual REALbasic code and is compiled so it’s much faster than PHP. ”
Really much faster _because it’s compiled_? Benchmarks?
Joe and Brad showed (and ran) benchmarks that showed it to be much faster, but I guess it depends on your definition of *much*.
Unfortunately their benchmarks don’t appear to be available on the site, but you should contact them for more information.