REALbasic 2007r4 ships

REAL Software on Monday released REALbasic 2007 Release 4, an update to the popular cross-platform development tool that focuses on modernization and stability. The company says the update brings over 80 improvements and nine new features including Ubuntu linux support, faster ODBC and faster database access. Release 4 delivers an updated ODBC plug-in that has been optimized to provide significantly faster performance, according to the company. In addition, the REALbasic database API is now "significantly" faster when iterating through a recordset using the Field function. According to REAL, when combined with the new ODBC plug-in, customers have reported a 20x speed improvement in the performance of some database operations.

"I have been testing the faster ODBC Plugin as I have been porting my database application from Visual Basic to REALbasic," stated Frederick Roller of F.W. Roller & Associates. "I am pleased to report that with the faster ODBC Plugin provided in REALbasic 2007 Release 4, my test code now runs 23 times faster than it did before. These updates make me confident in my decision to use REALbasic as my development environment."

REAL also noted that the software's debugger console applications have been enhanced by the addition of properties that simulate command line arguments. Developers can now set the application location as well as well utilize a new delegate datatype that provides an abstract representation of a method and allows variable implementation of a specific invocation.

"REALbasic has always had strong support for cross-platform connectivity," stated Jonathan Monroe, Managing Partner for Actual Technologies. "With the latest optimizations for ODBC, REALbasic applications now rival Visual Basic counterparts for fast data access."

Prices for the full-featured software development environment start at $200 (standard edition). REALbasic Professional Edition, required for cross-platform deployment, is $500. A trial version includes the latest release, documentation, example projects, and plugins/utilities.

by MacNN Staff