Software Made Simple

RBUnit is now open-source (using the BSD license).  You can read more about it here and download it at RBDevZone.

I submitted the draft of my unit testing session for REAL World (the deadline is this Friday).  The current schedule indicates that my session will be on Friday May 11 at 10:00am.

One question I’ve been asked is why I like REALbasic so much. The answer is simple: it’s fun. I’ve been working in software for over 15 years now and sometimes it’s been fun and sometimes it hasn’t. But for some reason I always find it fun to work with REALbasic.

Right now I also work a lot with C#, VB.NET and Team Foundation Server. These latest Microsoft technologies are incredibly powerful but are also immense and complex. Perhaps not as complex as Java J2EE, but they’re getting there. I just don’t find them fun. The printed manuals for the .NET 1.1 framework consists of 7 volumes spread over 10 books that stack to over 2.5 feet high! I have no idea how much bigger the .NET 2.0 manuals would be. Really, it’s just not fun. And now there’s WPF, XAML, WF, WCF and more. It looks neat at first, but then I start working with it and I find that it’s just not fun. And you can tell it won’t be fun just by the boring, unfun(tm) names that Microsoft calls these things.

I find Java to be much the same. It looks like it should be fun, and might have been at one point, but it isn’t fun any more. I have an entire shelf of Java books that I have never finished because they were boring. And believe me, boring is not fun.

In the past, I worked quite a bit with PowerBuilder. In its day, I found it fun. But now is no longer its day. I think it became unfun when Sybase thought PowerBuilder should integrate with Java. I don’t think that ever worked out well. Now (see PB 11 beta) they are integrating PowerBuilder with .NET. That’s two unfun things for PowerBuilder. Perhaps practical, but definitely not fun.

I never worked with Visual Basic before .NET, but it seems to me that a lot of people thought that VB6 was fun. And many of these people don’t seem to find .NET fun. To them, I say “try REALbasic!”

I hear a lot of talk about Ruby on Rails, although I don’t know that much about it. I think there is a lot of buzz around it because people find it fun.

I find REALbasic fun because:

• I can work on Mac OS X, my preferred OS, yet create applications for Windows
• the language reference is only about 1,000 pages (not 10,000 or more)
• it’s simple to learn
• the IDE is simple to use
• The language is very robust
• I write for a REALbasic magazine
• the community is great

REALbasic would be even more fun if it could also easily create web applications, but eventually it will. It actually can create web applications now, just not as easily as I would like. And for web apps maybe I should look into RoR, anyway.

So, I use REALbasic because I think it’s fun. And if I’m not having fun then I don’t want to do this anymore.

Do you have fun making software? Or are you stuck working with something unfun?

Last Friday we made UltraToolBar open-source (BSD licencse) and freely available on RBDevZone. Also look for a postmortem article about UltraToolBar in the next issue of REALbasic Developer Magazine.

In the few days since being available, there have been over 100 downloads of UltraToolBar and we now have over 150 registered users on RBDevZone. What this means, I don’t know yet.

I’ve also had a few questions come up lately. One is “will RBUnit be made open-source, too?” The short answer is that yes, RBUnit will soon also be available as open-source.

I’ve also been asked why I’m releasing our formerly non-free software as free (not that they’re complaining). There are a variety of reasons, but the primary reason is that these products, although fun to work on, just don’t generate enough revenue. But I didn’t want them to just disappear since a lot of people use them, so that is why they are now free. But free software is not too useful if there is no community to go to for support, which is why they are part of RBDevZone.

Essentially, I’m moving LogicalVue away from selling developer tools and components. We may still create something developer-related, but it will end up on RBDevZone instead of being an official LogicalVue product. Instead I’m going to focus LogicalVue on vertical market software that will be much more specialized but also more expensive.

I’m also preparing to do some additional consulting work. I’ll be trying to drum up some work while I’m at the REAL World conference next month.