I met Kevin Cully of Cully Technologies at the REAL World conference last week. He’s a FoxPro consultant looking to make the move to REALbasic. In addition, Kevin runs a conference for FoxPro developers called FoxForward.
Kevin’s a great guy so I thought I would help him plug his conference. If any of you out there are FoxPro developers, be sure to check out his conference web site.
Day 2
Day 2 of REAL World started with a nice breakfast (eggs, sausage and home fries). The first session I attended was Expanding REALbasic: Discovering Community Resources by REALBasic Developer Magazine publisher Marc Zeedar. RBDevZone got a nice little plug.
Next up for me was Bringing a Single-User Database to a Multi-User Database by REAL Software’s Mike Bailey. Mike did a good job with the presentation as we followed “Wally” and his process of converting Read the rest of this entry »
Day 1 of REAL World 2007 is over. Here’s a recap:
Breakfast
Spent some time talking with Jason Parsley of REAL Software, Marc Zeedar of REALbasic Developer Magazine. Met Kevin Cully of Cully Technologies.
Keynote Presentations
The day started with Geoff Perlman’s (CEO of REAL Software) keynote. Some notable highlights:
I’m not sure what these numbers mean, though. It certainly isn’t unique users because I have both a Mac and Windows license. And the Linux numbers can’t possibly be accurate. I’ve installed REALbasic for Linux (which is free) at least 10 times as I’ve tested various Linux distros. Are they counting each of those installs (which download a free license key) separately? Rather than platform breakout, I’d like to know the breakout of those that use REALbasic Professional and REALbasic Standard. I’ll see if I can ask Geoff that tomorrow.
REALbasic uses Carbon for the Mac framework. REAL still intends to replace Carbon with Cocoa, but they do not have an ETA. Another thing that doesn’t have an ETA is Swordfish, the web-app extension to REALbasic. Originally Swordfish was intended to generate Web 1.0 apps, but they are now redoing the architecture to instead build Web 2.0 apps.
Geoff did a very cool demo of the new incremental compiling feature added to REALbasic 2007 Release 2. He opened up the source code for the REALbasic IDE itself (which is written in REALbasic) and ran it in debug mode. It took about 20 seconds or so from start to finish. Then he made a small change and did this again. It took about 6 seconds. That’s quite a time savings. Very nice! On another note, Geoff noted that the REALbasic IDE consists of about 600 project items and about 150,000 lines of code.
REAL Software had its highest sales ever in the first quarter of 2007, which is nice to hear. Related to that, I counted about 120 or so attendees, which is about the same as last year.
Next Geoff talked a bit about REAL SQL Server. He noted that the REAL Software Feedback system and online store both use REAL SQL Server on the back end. He also noted some new pricing that will take effect when REAL SQL Server 2007 Release 1 is available:
An unlimited connection server is now $500 (formally $1000). And there are now developer bundles for those that want to bundle REAL SQL Server directly with their software.
All in all, nothing Earth-shattering, but good information nonetheless.
Customer Keynotes
Next, there were three brief presentations from customers that have created notable REALbasic products:
It was quite impressive to see how each of these folks have built their companies around REALbasic solutions.
Next, Novell came on to talk about Linux and SuSe Linux, which wasn’t really all that interesting.
Sessions
The first session I went to was Getting Started as a REALbasic Consultant. This was presented by Bob Keeney and Christian Miller. I learned a few useful things. Good job, guys!
Next I went to the Team Development and Version Control session where Jon Johnson of REAL Software showed us how to use REALbasic with Subversion. REALbasic has had its issues working with version control systems so it was very good to see this in action.
Lastly, I went to the Using XML for Your Document File Format session with Chris Griffin. Having used XML quite a bit, I didn’t really find much useful information for me.
Dinner Event
On the way over, met Jamie Lay (Install Factory). Dinner was at Stubb’s Bar-B-Que where we had a good buffet. It wasn’t the best bar-b-que I’ve ever had, but it was good. It wasn’t really a big enough venue for all of us, though. There was also live music (Trish Murphy).
I sat for a while with Aaron Ballman and Guyren Howe. There was talk, discussion and debate on Windows vs. Mac OS X, Microsoft .NET, Mono, and REALbasic of course.
More tomorrow!
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