Realbasic Alternatives

So, you want to develop apps quickly and easily but you are sick of Realbasic’s subscription model, or are annoyed by the forced switch to “Studio”. What to do? The latest news from Real Software has me thinking (again) about what I should do rather than continue to use Realbasic, and here are the alternatives I’ve come up with.

XCode — Free (Mac). On the downside, you can’t deploy on Windows (or Linux, if you care). On the upside, actually supports all Mac UI widgets properly, has far fewer stupid bugs, can actually load images with alpha channels, produces apps which you don’t need to be ashamed were created with Realbasic, allows you to deploy on the iPhone, and actually has pretty good tools for building web apps.

Cocotron looks to offer the Holy Grail of cross-platform development. Develop your apps in XCode and Cocoa and simply compile to Windows. I haven’t tried it yet, but it certainly seems intriguing and it appears to be under pretty active development.

Unity — $199 and up (Mac/Win as of 2.5, also iPhone/Wii). On the downside, doesn’t produce standard desktop apps. On the upside, very good for game and multimedia development (far better than Realbasic); generally superior performance to Realbasic; your programs can run in web browsers, the iPhone, and even the Wii; one license allows you to code on both Mac and Windows; actually has a superior GUI for OO development than Realbasic (once you get your head around it); supports three languages (Boo, C#, and JavaScript), each of which is an easy move for RB coders; no subscription model.

BlitzMax — $80 (Mac/Win/Linux). Very fast, modern BASIC with full cross-platform GUI support (available as a $30 add-on). Designed with 2D game development in mind, but perfectly capable of being used for app development. Downside: bare-bones IDE which does not include visual GUI tools or handle bindings between UI elements, events, properties, and code. Visual GUI tools (which do do these things) are available from third parties.

Python — Free (Mac/Win/Linux). Python is not only a ridiculously nice language, it’s also hip and cool and highly marketable. It’s kind of like JavaScript without the negative associations (but also without the ability to run in Web browsers). For GUI development, Tkinter looks interesting and PythonCard actually seems pretty compelling.

Java — Mostly Free (Mac/Win/Linux). Well, Eclipse is pretty nice, and I assume that by now it’s probably possible to produce vaguely decent UIs. I’ll need to look into this. Java is definitely not my favorite language, but it’s very marketable.

Netbeans — Free (Mac/Win/Linux). Free and open source IDE and runtime that lets you code in Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, C/C++, and (shortly) Python. OK that sounds too good to be true. (I downloaded 6.5 and messed with it a bit. It falls under the category “I guess it probably seems pretty neat if you think Solaris is pleasant to use”, so — yeah — too good to be true.)

Web-based — Mostly Free, and some amazingly good, cheap stuff (e.g. Coda). On the downside, you can’t deploy standalone desktop apps via the web. Oh wait, you can. And you are living with whatever functionality you get from browsers (i.e. JavaScript, canvas, Flash, etc.). On the upside, web apps are where the action is. And there’s always Cappuccino and Atlas.

Adobe AIR — Free? (Mac/Win/Linux). Essentially a runtime that bundles Webkit, Flash, and other functionality, allowing you to build web apps that run like applications (including being able to avoid the usual sandbox restrictions). Of course, you’re essentially trapped inside the functionality provided by Webkit (and Flash, if you choose to use it).

Flex Builder Standard 3 — $249 (Mac/Win). On the downside, produces non-standard (Flash-like) UIs. On the upside, your software runs inside browsers (OK, not on iPhones, but neither does Realbasic); you don’t pay a subscription, and Adobe will provide free bug-fixes even for outdated versions of its software. Also, Flash-like UIs are all the rage anyway, and at least you’ll have a consistent user experience on all platforms. Oh, and ActionScript 3 is not going to be hard to learn for Realbasic developers.

Runtime Revolution — $49/$249/$499 (Mac/Win/Linux). On the downside, produces non-standard (sometimes ugly) UIs, and the language is a bit outmoded (although nice in many ways). On the upside, there’s no subscription model.

Qt SDK — Free or Expensive (Mac/Win/Linux). Built on top of the well-known Qt UI library. On the down side, requires you to code in C++. On the upside, produces robust, cross-platform apps. Builds skills that get you better paid jobs than RB experience. The free version is only useful for producing free apps, but that’s a lot of what I do with Realbasic. Correction: the free Qt version can be used for proprietary apps. (And frankly, no-one cares if you open-source a RB Project.)

Lazarus — Free (Mac/Win/Linux). Very interesting looking open source recreation of Delphi. If it works it could be fabulous — I love Object Pascal (although it’s hardly a popular language these days). It appears to let you compile both native Cocoa and X11 apps on OS X.

It’s worth noting that it’s not easy to replace Realbasic for cross-platform development. I can whip up a cross-platform utility with a native UI in Realbasic with almost ridiculous ease, and that’s simply not true for any of these options.

I’ll probably end up keeping an active Realbasic license for as long as I make money from contract programming with it. But, I’ll be moving all the projects I can move, along with any new projects, away from Realbasic ASAP. RiddleMeThis, for example, may well be rewritten using web technology, with desktop deployment via Adobe AIR or something similar.

Other Useful Links

Wikipedia’s compilation of RAD tools

Microsoft’s “Express” (i.e. free) development tools