For more information, view the blog post at LogicalVue.com:

http://www.logicalvue.com/2012/01/changes-at-logicalvue-for-2012/

It’s available here at RBDevZone:

UltraUpdater

The demo app shows you how it works.  Full source code is included with purchase.  Previous purchases can get this update for free.  Eventually, I’ll have a Real Studio Web Edition app to handle this, but for now if you purchased and want the new source code, please email me.

CodeVue features:

• Full syntax highlighting
• Manage any number of code snippets
• Searching
• Copy/Paste
• Create new snippet from clipboard

New features planned for CodeVue include:

• Sharing code between computers using Dropbox
• Font selection
• Sharing code online with other users
• Support for syntax highlighting of other languages

View CodeVue in the Mac App Store.

Using an ORM such as Storm allows you to simplify your database applications. Benefits include:

• Access your database without using SQL
• Map classes to your database tables without writing any code
• Simple syntax
• Transaction management
• Serialization and deserialization to XML
• Optional SQL logging
• Automatic processing of database schema updates

Visit the Storm web site for more information:

http://storm.logicalvue.com

With SQLVue Lite, you can view all your tables, views, data and even write SQL SELECT statements. It’s a great way to work with SQLite and REALSQLDatabase. And if you find you need to also modify your databases, you can purchase the full version for only $20.

SQLVue Lite (free)

SQLVue ($20)

In this course, you’ll get an overview of Real Studio and then you’ll learn how to build a ToDo application for the desktop and then learn how to migrate it to web edition.

Order the training course using this link and we’ll get credit:

7-hour Real Studio Training Course from VTC

(You can choose to order a physical CD of the course or you can choose to watch it online.)

Unlike Bob, I’ve always been a software developer. I’ve been writing software since I was a teenager, starting with Atari BASIC on an Atari 800XL. In college, I used Turbo Pascal and C primarily. But also worked with Lisp, Fortran, Scheme and others. In the early 90s I had a few apps that I wrote for the Atari ST (using Pascal, C and GFA BASIC), one of which was shareware and made a decent amount of money, at least for a poor college student.

My first job out of school was working with a DOS-based tool called Advanced Revelation. It was an integrated system that built database applications (it used it’s own proprietary database). It’s programming language was called R/BASIC. At the time all our workstations had Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, which I thought was a horrible operating system. So I used IBM OS/2 Warp for all my development. OS/2 Warp was slick. It was a modern OS that could also run DOS and Windows apps, often better than Windows itself could.

After a couple years of working on this app, I was put in charge of the project to migrate it to Microsoft Windows. This involved rewriting the entire application using PowerBuilder, another integrated environment that worked very well with databases. Oracle was chosen as the database server. Unlike every programming system I had used before, PowerBuilder was object-oriented, which I quickly came to appreciate.

Unfortunately, PowerBuilder was a 32-bit app didn’t work well with OS/2 (which could only run 16-bit Windows apps) so this meant I had to switch to Windows. However, I wasn’t about to use Windows 95 and instead jumped to Windows NT 4.0, which was at least a modern operating system, even if it was Windows.

You’ll note at no point had I ever used a Macintosh. Having used Atari ST computers, I always felt the Macintosh was inferior. And I was no fan of the original Mac OS, which did not have preemptive multitasking and was really no better than Windows 95, in my opinion. But in early 2001 a friend of mine who was a grad student stopped by with his new toy: a PowerBook. I wasn’t too interested, but he showed me the beta of Apple’s new Macintosh operating system, Mac OS X. Now that impressed me. Mac OS X was a full-blown Unix system with a slick UI and modern OS features such as preemptive multitasking. I ran right out and bought a book on OS X so I could learn more about it.

I remained impressed and when Apple announced in May 2001 that they were shipping all new Macs with OS X pre-installed, I ordered a PowerMac G4. I booted it into Mac OS 9 once and that was only because it was still the default OS. I switched the default OS to Mac OS X and never looked back. I remember how people at the time used to complain how slow Mac OS X was, but I can tell you that it was no slower than using Windows NT!

After having the PowerMac for a few months I began to get an itch to program it. I still was primarily working with PowerBuilder at my day job (and also a little Java) and started looking around at options for programming the Mac.

The programming pickings were slim. CodeWarrior (what a cool name for an IDE, by the way) was commonly used, but I really had no interest in programming in C. Java worked on Mac OS X, but there were no good IDEs available at the time. I then somehow stumbled across something called REALbasic, a purported clone of Visual Basic.

I had never used Visual Basic, having heard mostly bad things about it. But I downloaded the REALbasic trial and played around with it. I thought it had potential, so I bought Matt Neuberg’s book, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide and studied it for a couple months. Based on Matt’s excellent book, I determined that REALbasic would be a good choice, so in late December 2001, I ordered REALbasic Professional. If I recall, it was at version 3.5 when I ordered but version 4.0 came out only a couple weeks after I ordered, so Real actually held off sending me the manuals (this was when they had printed manuals) so that they could send me the new manuals.

What drew me to REALbasic at the time were it’s object-oriented capabilities, which were about equal to what PowerBuilder could do, and its UI designer. I also was drawn to the fact that REALbasic also had it’s own native database engine. The IDE was a bit odd for me, coming from a Windows background, but I quickly got used to it.

I didn’t use REALbasic for anything significant at first and then in early 2002, I saw something from Marc Zeedar that he was starting up a REALbasic magazine and was looking for columnists. I proposed a Database column for the magazine, but it didn’t make the initial cut. After Marc debuted the magazine at MacWorld NY, he told me the number one request was for a database column, so my column was added for issue #2 and has been in every issue since then.

In early 2003, I incorporated LogicalVue Software. During this time I created a few REALbasic apps and tools that I sold through my web site, such as SQLVue, RBUnit and UltraToolBar.

Also during this time I moved on to another company and switched from working with PowerBuilder to working with Microsoft .NET using both C# and VB.

In 2005, REALbasic 2005 was released with it’s all-new IDE and I loved it. The new IDE reminded me of Visual Studio and I thought it was much easier to work with than the old IDE that had windows all over the place.

Speaking of Visual Studio, also released late that year was Visual Studio 2005. In 2006, I began work on porting a project from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005. This was far more difficult than it should have been. But I could see the writing on the wall. Microsoft was doing what they do best and taking something that was nice and simple and making it horribly complex. I began to get disillusioned with .NET.

This all came to head in August 2007 when I made the decision to start looking for REALbasic consulting work. And I found plenty. So much so that by spring of 2008, I had enough work that I had to leave my full-time .NET job so that I could focus on REALbasic consulting.

Since then I’ve been primarily doing Real Studio consulting and development. I do occasionally do a .NET project, mostly web-related, but now that Real Studio does web applications I may not have to resort to .NET for anything anymore, which pleases me.

Real Studio is certainly not perfect. It has its idiosyncrasies and even a fair share of bugs. But I’ve used a lot of development tools and I’ve yet to run into one that doesn’t have it’s fair share of bugs and problems that need to be worked around. Advanced Revelation, PowerBuilder, Visual Studio, Oracle, SQL Server, Turbo Pascal, Java IDEs whose name I forget and don’t even exist anymore, they all had annoying bugs. And all of them were (or are) supported by companies far less responsive than Real Software. I feel that creating a bug-free development environment is an impossible task. After all, an IDE can be used in an infinite number of ways. It’s impossible to test every use case. More importantly, this also means there is more than one way to skin a cat. It’s often possible to find workarounds that will allow you to get what you need done.

Real Studio allows me to get work done. But perhaps more importantly, I enjoy using it. I never enjoyed using Visual Studio, .NET or Java, although I remain fond of PowerBuilder.

I hope to continue using Real Studio for a long time.

SQLVue

This is still a Carbon app, but it mostly works fine as a Cocoa app. The only remaining issue that I have is that the MacWindowMenu that I am using (from Charles Yeomans) is implemented in Carbon and doesn’t display in Cocoa.

SQLite Migrator

This is still a Carbon app, but it also seems to mostly work fine as a Cocoa app. A new version is forthcoming, so if testing proves that the Cocoa build is stable, I’ll ship it as a Cocoa version.

Client Project 1

This app is being developed and tested using only Cocoa. So far we haven’t run into any problems. No 3rd party plugins are used.

Client Project 2

This app does not yet run in Cocoa because of a dependency on the eSellerate plugin.

Client Project 3

Preliminary testing has not uncovered any problems while running as a Cocoa build. It uses the ODBC plugin.

Client Project 4

This project seemed to work just fine. It uses some MBS and Einhugur plugins.

Client Project 5

This app does not yet work for unknown reasons. The app immediately crashes on launch before it even gets to the App.Open event. It does use some MBS and Einhugur plugins, but they are all the latest versions. I need to do more research to pinpoint the cause.

Client Project 6 (GA)

This project is still using the REALSQLServerDatabase plugin, which is not Cocoa compatible. A quick test with the new CubeSQLServer plugin indicates that this project mostly works. There was a crash when attempting to display the Einhugur StyleGrid, but that was fixed by upgrading to StyleGrid 9.0.1.

Conclusion

All-in-all, I’d say things are starting to look good. Out of eight current projects, six are working almost perfectly (that’s 75%). It’s taken a long time, but I think Cocoa is finally usable for many projects. If you haven’t already, be sure to test your projects with Cocoa and report any issues to Real Software.

SQLVue is a new, elegant IDE for SQLite developers. You can purchase it through the Mac App Store at a special introductory price of $9.99 through April 15th.

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.