New topic in General: REALbasic praise & woes
scottduane - Wed Apr 16, 2008 9:22 am <http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=21857> -I'm a registered user since version 2 or 3 -I've tried, used (and wasted money) on many other development products -REALbasic is without a doubt the most productive development environment there is when you consider the ease of cross-platform development Like everyone else I love all the new features REAL Software has brought to the product, whether I have a specific need for them or not. Also, verifiable bugs seem to get fixed within a reasonable period of time. I have but one complaint... documentation. It would be nice if either REALbasic functioned as documented or was documented as it functions. A lot of productive time is lost when the developer must go sleuthing, write mini-programs or search these forums to find out why things don't work as advertised. For example, the documentation for the ListBox event "Change()" says that it is triggered when the selected row has changed. Truth is, it fires whether the selected row has changed or not. I've also run into similar "hard-to-find" discrepancies (bugs) within the Keyboard module. Time spent tracking down these things can be very frustrating, and is unproductive. That said, I won't switch to another pair of development environments and the learning curves associated with them. That would require even more lost and productive development time. I would make my plea for better documentation on the REALbasic event mechanism. When are application and control events triggered? In what order? Which ones can be triggered internally by setting the value of an associated property? When are they not triggered because of other conditions? Because much of this is handled internally and out of the programmers supervision, they can take a lot of time to track down. Finally, the REALbasic examples are very helpful. There needs to be more of them that illustrate the basics (i.e. the event mechanism). Things like associating scrollbars to other controls that don't have built-in scrollbars and keeping them properly updated could use an example or two. The Users Guide and Language Reference leave much of this as an "exercise for the reader". In conclusion, I love new features (like introspection) but I'd forego any others for a release or two if that what it takes for the documentation and examples to catch up with the the most powerful and easiest-to-use cross-platform development environment in the marketplace! -- Over 900 classes with 18000 functions in one REALbasic plug-in. The Monkeybread Software Realbasic Plugin v8.1. <http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/plugins.shtml> [email protected]
