2011 ARBP Real Studio Summit Recap

Posted by paul on Mar 22, 2011 in Real Studio, Summit | 10 comments

This past weekend (March 19th and 20th) in Atlanta, about 50 or so people attended the 2011 Real Studio Summit. If you weren’t there, you missed out on a great event for Real Studio Developers.

I arrived at the hotel around 9:30pm on Friday. A bunch of folks were hanging out in the hotel bar and after checking in and visiting my room, I returned to the bar to chat. It was great to see and talk with people that I hadn’t seen since Real World 2008. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived back to the bar the kitchen had closed. Luckily I had two bags of pretzels on the flight to Atlanta!

I was planning on giving away some copies of the Real Studio Training that I did for VTC earlier this year. Rather than just collecting business cards for the giveaway, I had the idea that I should create a Real Studio web application for people to enter their name into the drawing.

So I quickly threw together a simple web app that had a single page to enter your name and email, which would be tossed into a database. I decided to use the beta of CubeSQL Server to store this data so that I could pull out the winners using a simple desktop app.

Summit Day 1

On Saturday morning, the conference began with a light breakfast in the conference room at 8:00am. While eating breakfast, I will still tweaking my little web app for the drawing.

Keynote

At 9am, Bob Keeney, president of ARBP, started the conference with a short overview of ARBP. Then he turned the floor over to Geoff Perlman, CEO of Real Software. Geoff gave us an overview (and some demos) of upcoming Real Studio features.

First, he talked about Cocoa and demoed a beta of the Real Studio IDE running in Cocoa. Cocoa is coming along very nicely and they are eager to get it out of beta. It seems like it has a high priority right now.

Next, Geoff talked about 64-bit support for Real Studio. He said that this is an enormous project, much bigger than they expected. He gave a preliminary estimate of Q1 2012, which tells you that this is still a long ways away.

Then he talked about the new LLVM compiler that is being worked on. He reminded us that RBScript in the current version of Real Studio is already using LLVM and that this was where most of the work was done. When Cocoa is more stable, resources will again move back to LLVM. Right now, the plan is to use LLVM first on Mac OS X and Linux. Support for Windows will come later because they might need to write their own linker. Geoff was hopeful that LLVM support would be available around the end of the year. He also reiterated that the LLVM compiler is a prerequisite for iOS and Android support.

Of course, Geoff had to spend some time on the latest addition to Real Studio: web edition. They have made changes so that it is possible to release updates to the Javascript framework (which is what runs in the web browser and communicates with the web app running on the web server) in between Real Studio releases.

Geoff also noted that they are working on adding more desktop controls to the web framework, such as tab controls.

A significant new feature that he showed was something called WebSockets. This new technology allows the browser to more efficiently communicate with the web application on the server. This improvement will be used automatically by your web apps on supported browsers, which includes Firefox 4, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t support this technology, even in IE 9 which was released just last week.

Lastly, Geoff talked about the IDE itself and demoed the all-new IDE design that they are working on. I found this design to be very reminiscent of Xcode. Significant changes include:
* The Project “tab” is always visible (as a sidebar)
* Tabs are optional
* It might be ready for beta as part of Real Studio 2011 Release 2

General Sessions

I had the first session, Databases Made Simple, and I was excited to use my new web app for the drawing for the free training videos. Unfortunately, my decision to use a beta database server did not work out well. The database server crashed after just a few people started using it and I was not able to get it back up and running reliably. So I had to collect business cards.

For my session, I gave an overview of some database servers that work well with Real Studio, some SQLite features (Write Ahead Logging and Prepared Statements) and then talked about object-relational mapping (ORM) and gave a demo of my Storm framework.

This transitioned nicely into the next session on Making Database Code More Manageable by Seth Verrinder of BKeeney Software. Seth gave a more in-depth overview of ORM and then talked about the Real Studio implementation of ActiveRecord that is used at BKeeney Software.

Lunch was provided in the hotel restaurant and was quite good.

After lunch, Kevin gave his talk on Migrating to Real Studio from Visual Fox Pro. Kevin did a great job of explaining why Real Studio is an obvious choice for Fox Pro developers. I think future conferences might benefit from a session that expands on this and talks about why Fox Pro/FileMaker/Access developers should consider moving to Real Studio.

Bob Keeney was up next and he talked about Reporting Tools. I use Real Reports (included in Real Studio), On-Target Reports and RS Reports in a variety of projects. I was happy to learn that Valentina Reports will also soon be supporting SQLite databases. I’ll have to try that out.

After Bob’s session, I got up to get a cookie and ended up in the hallway where I had some great conversions with Thomas Tempelmann, Charles Yeomans, Norman Palardy and Bob Keeney. Unfortunately, this means I also missed the next two sessions (PDFs in your RB Applications and Getting Started with Real Studio), so I can’t comment on them. I’ll have to view them when the Summit videos are released.

(Yes, except for Geoff’s session, all the Summit presentations were recorded. These will be made available to all Summit attendees for free and available to purchase for those that could not attend).

Thomas Tempelmann had the last talk of the day, where he covered some useful tools that can help with your Real Studio development. I need to check out Code Helper and Arbed.

Dinner was at a local diner whose name escapes me was quite delicious. When we returned, I headed back to my room to update the drawing web app for my next session. Instead of using a server, I decided to simply use a SQLite database (in Write-Ahead Log mode) directly on the web server.

Summit Day 2

Sunday also started at 8am with breakfast.

The first session was Desktop to Web Primer, by Thom McGrath, the man behind web edition. He noted they are bringing some web features, such as Radio Group, Page Dialogs and Animator to desktop apps. He also showed off many of the cool features of web edition.

My Web Apps Made Simple session was next and this time my drawing web app worked just fine.

For my session, I showed the ToDo web application that is included in the VTC Real Studio Training videos. You can access the web app here:

http://www.logicalvue.com/ToDo/todo.cgi

We then briefly went over the code in the app, which you can download from my Summit 2011 page.

Thomas Tempelmann returned for his second presentation on the Technical Side of Selling Your Applications. Thomas have a great overview of some licensing systems, including Aquatic Prime. He also gave us all great insight into how crackers break licensing schemes. Information from his presentations is available here:

http://www.tempel.org/Summit2011

Advanced Language Features by Charles Yeomans was a session I was eager to hear. Charles gave great demonstrations of Weak References (which I need to start using for my Storm ORM) and delegates and how to use them in conjunction with AddHandler.

Christian Schmitz of MonkeyBread Software gave us all a demo of the amazing charts this his Chart Director plugin can create. He also showed how it can be used with web applications.

The last presentation of the conference was Using RS for Medical Research by Milton Lai. Milton showed us some code to print directly to a label printer via the serial port.

ARBP Business

With the conference sessions complete, there were a few orders of business to attend to. The first was a discussion of the future of the Association of REALbasic Professionals. The most important topic up for discussion was that Bob Keeney will be stepping down as President of ARBP.

After some discussion and good ideas, we identified the board members:

Bob Keeney and I will remain on the board.

New board members are:

• Geoff Perlman of Real Software
• Marc Zeedar of Real Studio Developer Magazine
• Scott Boss of Nocturnal Coding Monkeys

There will be an ARBP board meeting (via conference call) in April where the board will choose a new President and will decide on the Treasurer and Secretary. This will be a public meeting and anyone is invited to attend. More details to follow soon.

Q&A

Lastly, there was a comment, question and answer session. Here people had the opportunity to offer comments, advice or ask questions about the conference in general. Some suggestions for the next conference include:

• More time between sessions for networking
• People seemed to like having a single track of sessions
• It would be a good idea to have separate machines for the presentations and for demos, rather than flipping between them on a single machine
• People would like to have access to a list of those who are planning on attending the conference
• Atlanta was a popular location and easy to get to
• Some felt that having a hotel closer to the city would offer more restaurant options and have more stuff for family to do
• Everyone agreed the location should remain as an airline hub city
• There was a suggestion to do a colocation conference with other niche technologies to help share costs

And for “one last thing”, Real then took questions from everyone. First Geoff introduced the staff that attended the conference: Norman Palardy, Thom McGrath and Greg O’Lone. Geoff was very candid and answered questions as best he could. There was a lot of talk about how to improve the beta program and how to best handle bug fixing.

And with that complete, the 2011 ARBP Summit was over. I had a great time, but unfortunately, it went by way too quickly. I jumped on a plane and left the warmth of Atlanta to return to Maine.