OT: Analyzing competitors - In this case Real Software

[Mark Wieder]

Mark-

Tuesday, March 22, 2005, 7:05:45 AM, you wrote:

MT> There is a small bit at MacCentral:  
MT> <http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/21/realbasic/index.php> with the
MT> following paragraph:   "REAL Software noted in the REALbasic 5.5.5
MT> release that of the 25 percent or so of its user base who are porting
MT> applications, 47 percent are porting Visual Basic applications 
MT> specifically."

As a veteran of having ported more than my share of VB into xtalk, I
can state that the VB-to-RB path is much easier than the rethinking it
takes to get to runrev. Especially for developers who are comfortable
with the spaghetti code that you always end up with in VB. RB usually
requires only minor changes to the code before it will compile as a
cross-platform app. In the real world I think RB probably offers a
better time-to-market for cross-platform porting. If that's all you're
after.

That said, you don't get the benefits of runrev when you make a
straightforward conversion. The real advantages start to appear when
you analyze and redesign the code instead of recoding verbatim. And,
of course, there's no comparison when it comes to starting a new
project from scratch. At least until you need to get out of the
sandbox and craft an external.

One of the main tasks facing any new development environment is trying
to convince basic programmers to unlearn the bad habits they've picked
up. RB has an advantage here in that VB programmers can keep all their
bad habits without penalty. Not too much thinking involved.

Aside: I recently had to code a VB equivalent to
  replace crlf with linefeed in myString
and it was no fun.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net