Realbasic Quick Start

REALbasic QuickStart Welcome to REALbasic! REALbasic is an application builder based on a modern version of the BASIC programming language. The REALbasic development environment is made up of a rich set of graphical user interface objects (commonly referred to as a GUI), an object-oriented language, a debugger, and a compiler. With the graphical user interface, you can build your application’s interface simply by dragging and dropping interface objects into the application’s windows and dialogs. Together with REALbasic’s object-oriented language, debugger, and cross-platform compiler, it makes up REALbasic’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed to make application prototyping and programming easy. REALbasic provides you with all the tools you need to build virtually any application you can imagine. If you are new to programming, you will find that REALbasic makes it fun and easy to create full-featured applications. If you are an intermediate or advanced program- mer, you will appreciate REALbasic’s rich set of built-in tools. This QuickStart is for people who are new to programming and new to REALbasic. It will give you a gentle introduction to the REALbasic development environment, lead you through the development of a real application, and show you what kinds of other applications can be built with REALbasic. It should take you no longer than 30 minutes to complete this QuickStart. REALbasic QuickStart 1 Note If you have experience with other versions of the BASIC language or have experience with other programming languages, you’ll want to check out the Tutorial and User’s Guide. In the Tutorial, you’ll develop a more complete application, which includes menus, dialog boxes, and objects called classes. Presentation Conventions The QuickStart uses screen snapshots taken from the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux versions of REALbasic. The interface design and feature set are identical on all platforms, so the differences between platforms are cosmetic and have to do with the differences between Windows XP’s standard appearance setting, the Macintosh’s Mac OS X interface, and Linux’s ‘Bluecurve’ desktop that ships with Red Hat Linux. Italic type is used to emphasize the first time a new term is used, and to highlight important concepts. In addition, titles of books, such as REALbasic User’s Guide, are italicized. When you are instructed to choose an item from one of REALbasic’s menus, you will see something like “choose File . New Project”. This is equivalent to “choose New Project from the File menu.” The items within the parentheses are keyboard shortcuts and consist of a sequence of …