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REALBASIC TO SUPPORT COCOA, APPLE'S FRAMEWORK FOR MAC OS X SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, IN 2009

AUSTIN, Texas, USA (August 12, 2008) — REAL Software, provider of REALbasic and REAL SQL Server, cross-platform software development tools for Mac, Windows and Linux developers, has announced that REALbasic will support Cocoa, Apple's framework for Mac OS X software development. As they announced at REAL World, the REAL Software User Conference, REAL Software has engineering resources devoted solely to Cocoa development. Cocoa support will be in beta in the first quarter of 2009 and will begin shipping mid-2009.

"We put a lot of effort into keeping REALbasic a modern product," stated Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of REAL Software. "Carbon was great technology for the switch from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X. Now it's important for us to lay the foundation for our future on the Mac and that is Cocoa."

Most REALbasic users will get the benefits of this modernization without having to make changes to their projects. Current REALbasic projects should recompile without any problems. Users will not need to learn the Cocoa APIs - they will continue to use the same REALbasic language they use today. REALbasic plugins that have no user interface should work without any modification. Plugins that have a user interface will need to be rewritten in Objective-C using the Cocoa APIs.

With support for Cocoa will also come a number of new features including editfields that support spell-checking, however applications built with this first release of Cocoa will still have the same User Interface as applications have today, but will be built with the Cocoa framework. Future releases will include more Cocoa specific features, but users can access those framework-specific features, like Core Animation, with this first release via Declares.

More information about this will be available in Q1 2009, when Cocoa is in beta. To join the REALbasic Beta Program, please visit the REAL Software Feedback System: http://www.realsoftware.com/feedback/

About REALbasic

REALbasic is a full-featured software development environment suited to creating a wide range of applications, from utilities to enterprise-class applications. REALbasic Personal (formerly Standard) Edition for Windows or Mac is priced at $100. REALbasic for Linux Personal Edition is offered for free. REALbasic Professional Edition, required for cross-platform deployment, is $500. All versions of REALbasic are available now and can be downloaded directly from REAL Software at http://www.realsoftware.com/download

About REAL Software

REAL Software provides REALbasic and REAL SQL Server, for developers who want to create and deliver cross-platform software for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. REAL Software was founded in 1996 and is based in Austin, Texas. For more information visit http://www.realsoftware.com or call 512.328.7325.

Dear God in Heaven!

Awesome, look forward to using it - thanks!

Cocoa declares as they are now, for me anyway, are really awkward to get to work properly. I hope some time and effort will be spent on the API's to access the Cocoa calls.

--
Thomas C.

The announcement just details the first release of Cocoa support. Ongoing development will take place after that first release that will lead to many new features.

If this means iphone support then "Wow, super fantastic". If not, big deal...

No, this does not mean iPhone support.

I know some RB coders are excited about Cocoa support but what big benefits do we get from this?

I am hoping there won't be a load of new bugs to deal with.

The main benefit will be that your app looks and behaves like a Cocoa app. Sheets will be transparent, controls won't have a rectangle texture around them (thus obsoleting the buggy Composite mode), the resize widget won't be that white rectangle thing, and more.

And there will undoubtedly be bugs. I don't think I've ever seen a major new feature that worked the first or second time around. Fortunately they eventually get it working well enough to work around any minor issues.

First and foremost ongoing support for a UI API that Apple will be supporting long term
Apple is deprecating a lot of the UI components of Carbon

This may sounds crazy to some but what is COCOA? I here this come up alot.

http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/

"Cocoa is simply the best way to create native Mac applications."

http://developer.apple.com/technology/cocoa.html

"The Cocoa frameworks consist of libraries, APIs, and runtimes that form the development layer for all of Mac OS X."

It is what their using for their desktop and iPhone apps.

So it's like VB.NET in a way. Okm thanks guys, as I have been hearing and seeing this alot.

Oh, so this wouldn't help a Windows programmer/coder then?

Sort of. VB.Net is more like Java in many respects.
The CLR ( .NET's Common Language Runtime ) is much like Java's virtual machine
Code is compiled and executed on this virtual machine (and this thing handle just in time compilation to real machine code and a pile of other tasks) I believe with the compilers MS provides you can still compile exe's directly that do not require the .Net runtimes and use dll's etc (obviously as they are used to produce parts of RB itself)

Cocoa is NOT this way at all
When you compile your code it compiles to machine code right then and there
The Objective C runtime facilitates the style of message passing that Cocoa uses, but it's all machine code not byte code running on a virtual machine.

In the end though it's all just API's that you and I use to write programs
Often it doesn't matter how they achieve this under the hood to you and I

Not quite, Cocoa is more like .Net itself including the WinForms assemblies.

In practice, using REALbasic with Cocoa support as comes close to VB.Net but as Norman has already pointed out, the .Net code runs on a virtual machine which is portable via the Mono project to Mac or Linux and some of it even runs in a Mac browser, with SilverLight.

A more direct equivalent in terms of what is compiled would be REALbasic with Cocoa = "Unmanaged C++" native code using a WinForms GUI.