REALBasic vs Revolution

[Lynn Fredricks]

> Wondering if anyone has personal experience using REAL Basic 
> and Revolution?  I did see some discussions on this list but 
> they're all pretty old.  At first glance, REAL Basic appears 
> to provide very similar functionality to Revolution and a few 
> things (like a report
> writer) that aren't in Revolution, at least without an extra 
> cost third party add-on.
> 
> Also possible that this isn't an appropriate place for such 
> discussions, and I'm fine with that.

You'll probably get a different response over on the REALbasic list.

Functionally, they couldn't be more different. 

RB is much more like a Visual Studio type product, and to get the most out
of it you really need to commit yourself to learning all the nuances of
traditional type programming, just as you would if you were going to learn a
language for using Visual Studio. 

Revolution lets you design first, use an English-like language, add
functionality, test without recompilation.

Both products produce applications that can run on multiple operating
systems. Rev supports deployment through a web plugin as well. And then,
there is a server-side Rev platform called On-Rev.

REAL's report writer is personally interesting to me. From RB 1 to RB 5.5, I
managed REAL's international sales. There was an incredible demand for
support for a report writer, especially for Crystal Reports, when RB was the
"Visual Basic for Mac". There wasn't a REAL Server back then. That came
later after REAL failed to acquire our Valentina DB product, and instead
built a server around SQLite. REAL's report writer came after we announced
and shipped Valentina Reports for REALbasic.

There are also a few other reporting solutions for Rev, as there are for
REALbasic. Most of those solutions are built from the native platform,
unlike Valentina Reports, which is developed in C++ with native wrappings.

The amount of add-ons and extensions for Rev is on the increase; I haven't
seen much new out there for RB. They started supporting some of their 3rd
party supporters by placing them in the REAL store - later than the
RevSelect program at Runtime.

Although both products produce native applications, Rev isn't trying to
mimic Visual Studio. If you want a Visual Studio type experience, then RB is
good; but then again, there is also Visual Studio, and if you are okay with
.net, Mono is what you need for cross platform and .net. But Rev doesn't do
.net.

I think if you evaluate both products with an eye of its support, new
features and market influence over the last five years, it will give you a
good idea of their potential for the future.

Rev is for developers who are willing to take a risk on a less traditional
programming paradigm; but Rev developers also benefit from the features and
support that you do not get from others.

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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