Hybrid Applications with REALbasic
Lately, I’ve stumbled across a few articles about hybrid applications. These are desktop applications that also make significant use of the internet. Examples of such applications include:
The benefits of a hybrid applications are that you get to access all the resources available to desktop applications while at the same time enjoying the benefits of the internet as a whole. This essentially means your application will be fast and well-connected.
In fact, applications like like iTunes, iSale, FeedDemon and even Second Life could be written in REALbasic.
Why REALbasic?
What the benefit of using REALbasic to build hybrid applications? First of all, REALbasic is cross-platform, which is a pretty important for a hybrid application. The biggest benefit to using a web application is, because it runs in a browser, it works on any platform. Normally, even a hybrid application is limited to the OS it was designed for. The fancy New York Times Reader (built with the latest .NET 3.0 stuff) still requires the entire .NET 3.0 framework to be installed so it will only work on Windows XP or Vista. Even Microsoft’s new Silverlight product, which is essentially a way to turn your web applications into hybrid applications, does not support Linux. And neither does Adobe’s offering, Air, at least not yet. (Of course, both Silverlight and Air allow you to create web-only applications as well, which REALbasic cannot do.)
And don’t forget, REALbasic applications are platform-native so you won’t have to require a run-time.
Internet Technologies Available in REALbasic
The second reason to consider REALbasic is that it has all kinds of built-in capabilities for creating hybrid applications. It includes the HTMLViewer control which allows you to show web pages directly in your application (using the Internet Explorer engine on Windows, Safari WebKit on Mac OS X and Mozilla Gecko on Linux). REALbasic has extensive networking support with HttpSockets and HttpSecureSockets. It can also communicate using SSL, TCP and UDP using the corresponding Socket classes.
And for cases where you need to easily communicate between REALbasic applications it includes the simplified AutoDiscovery, EasyTCPSocket and EasyUDPSocket classes.
REALbasic can also access web services. You’ll have to write them in a different tool, but REALbasic can call them using the SOAPMethod and SOAPResult classes. Support for e-mail is provide with POP3 and SMTP classes.
And lastly, REALbasic includes SQLite for local database storage (it’s called REALSQLDatabase, though), just like Adobe Air.
You can read all about these and other classes in the REALbasic Language Reference.
Try it Out
If you’re looking to make a hybrid application, you should consider REALbasic. You might find that it could save you a whole bunch of time. And if you get stuck, maybe I can help you out.
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