As most of our readers know, REALbasic is a great tool for producing
native applications on the Mac. It couples a well designed GUI builder
with an advanced version of BASIC. In addition, REALbasic supports
Windows and Linux, enabling cross-platform development. This is similar
to Sun's Java, although REALbasic is geared towards the client side
while Java dominates on the server side.
A few weeks ago we published an interesting interview with Andrew Barry, the
principal originator of REALbasic. I was lucky enough to get a follow
up interview with Geoff Perlman, CEO and President of REAL Software. Geoff gives us some more insight
into REALbasic's origins, supporting the Mac, and the challenges of
producing a cross platform development tool.
Of course we are all partial to the Mac, so I am excited to see
Cocoa support coming soon to REALbasic. However, I make my living as a
web developer, so I was also intrigued to hear that REAL Software's
vision is to add the Web as another target platform. In any case, read
on, I'm sure you'll find Geoff's answers worth pondering.
Tell me a little about your background and how you came to partner
with Andrew Barry to from REALbasic.
I had been looking for a development tool like
REALbasic and had dreamed about running a development tools company.
REALbasic, then called CrossBasic, was mentioned on a Mac news site
called MacInTouch. I went to
his site and found something that looked very rough but had
possibilities. I contacted him, and we discussed his future plans. By
the end of a call or two, we had agreed that I would raise some money,
acquire the product, and he would come to work for me. We spent six
months getting the product ready for market and launched REALbasic 1.0
on July 4th, 1998.
What potential did you see in REALbasic? What market need were you
trying to fill?
I saw two markets when we started. The first was the
need for something like Visual Basic, but for
Macintosh. The second was a tool that would let people build
applications for Mac and Windows. While the first release of REALbasic
was not cross-platform, it was always the intention to make it a
cross-platform product.
Give me some stats about REAL Software - sales, number of employees,
etc. - so we can see how the company has grown.
We don't give out this kind of information, as we are
a privately held company. But I will tell you that the company was
started on $100,000 and has been self-funding ever since. We started
with the Mac, then added support for Windows, and finally Linux. We
have continued to upgrade over the years providing support for Mac
OS X, Windows Vista, and various popular Linux distros.
What was the impact of OS X on REAL Software?
It was big, of course, in that it required a
significant amount of effort for us to support it, but it also
revitalized the Mac. We have gone through other transitions as well.
For example, we wrote a completely new compiler (which took two years
from start to shipping), we added support for mach-o (Apple's
executable format for Mac OS X) and of course Intel-based Macs.
And we added support for Linux as well.
It's important to understand that the needs of a
development tools company (in terms of information from the OS vendor)
are very different than those of the typical developer. The information
we need is often not published publicly - and in some cases not
published at all anywhere. For example, supporting mach-o and
Intel-based Macs required sending engineers to Apple to work with their
OS engineers directly.
I believe that one of our strengths is that we are
always willing to put in the time to modernize REALbasic. Many
companies allow their technology to decay, and by the time they really
realize it, it's almost too late to do anything about it.
Andrew Barry stated that the web is the main threat to REALbasic.
How do you respond?
The more platforms there are for deploying software,
the more fragmented the developer community becomes. This fragmentation
occurs because there are different development tools and languages for
reach platform. On the desktop alone you have many: Xcode from Apple,
Visual Studio from Microsoft, Eclipse from the open source community,
to name just a few. Developers generally speaking don't want to learn
lots of different tools and different languages, so they focus on one
platform. Some new developers therefore are going to focus on the Web
exclusively.
If REALbasic remained a development tool for the
desktop only, then developers who chose to develop for the Web could
not choose REALbasic. But my vision for REALbasic goes beyond the
desktop. Developers should not have to make this choice. They should be
able to use one language and development tool to deploy applications to
all the important platforms.
REALbasic is cross platform. Give us a breakdown of how the Mac,
Windows, and Linux contribute to your sales and where do you see the
most future growth?
That's not as easy to answer as it may first seem. For
example, we have the Personal Edition and the Professional Edition.
These attract very different types of users, so grouping them together
when discussing a particular platform doesn't make sense. Also, our
Personal Edition for Linux is free, so it's difficult to compare it to
the Mac and Windows versions. However, if you look at Professional
edition only, our users breakdown as approximately 43% Mac, 48% Windows
and 9% Linux.
What do you see as REALbasic's future? Do you have any new products
or features coming out the really excite you?
We listen carefully to what our customers are asking
for. They are asking us to continue to modernize. On the Mac, we are
working right now to add support for Cocoa to meet that demand. They
are also asking us to support mobile and the Web as new platforms. We
are investigating those platforms now. And as we always have, we will
deliver these in ways that abstract the developer from the messy
details and let them focus on what makes their software unique.
