[Updated 3/19/2008 to reflect REAL's change to the Pro package]

The cat is out of the bag: REAL Software has announced REAL Studio, a new edition of REALbasic.

You can find out more from the REAL Studio FAQ.

So what’s the difference?

REAL Studio has a much higher price: $1500. It also the following:

• a cross-platform license to run REALbasic on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
• a cross-platform license to REAL Server
• Priority technical support
• 12 months of updates (instead of 6) for new purchasers

Hand-in-hand with this announcement is a new lower price for REALbasic Professional. It drops from $500 to $300. But you also lose a few features for your $200. The Professional edition no longer includes the following as they are now exclusively REAL Studio features:

• IDE scripting
• Code Profiling

Whether that will matter to you will depend on how you use REALbasic. It certainly seems like a fair tradeoff for the price decrease. But if you rely heavily on those features, you’re either going to have to learn to live without them or be prepared to switch to REAL Studio.

The good news is that at least for the short term, this won’t affect current users. REAL is offering a free upgrade to REAL Studio for all current REALbasic Professional users. This means you’ll get to keep your current features and take advantage of the new stuff for the duration of your subscription (which you can currently extend for up to 2 years before April 14th).

Plenty of others will offer their opinions on whether this is good or bad for REALbasic and its community. I will just offer this:

REAL has made a decision that changes things for most REALbasic developers (and they did get feedback on it before the official announcement and made changes after the announcement based on feedback). I’m sure the NUG and forums will be awash with opinions one way or the other. Since people generally hate change, I suspect most comments will be critical of this. It’s difficult to accept losing features you once had.

However, I’m certain REAL feels that this change is in the best interests of REALbasic, REAL Software and the community. I would just like to encourage people, even if they vehemently disagree with this change, to provide constructive criticism and not just whine and complain.

Personally, I am in favor of this change.