REAL Software: New in REALbasic

REALbasic 2009 Release 2 (Shipped on April 14, 2009)
This release includes more than 70 improvements and 18 new features. The new features are:

COM Automation Support: Applications can take control of any other Windows application that supports COM automation.
MySQL Support: The Community Edition (free) of MySQL is now officially supported.

With this release comes a new edition of REALbasic, REAL Studio. REAL Studio includes:

A license key that can be installed on any number of computers or operating systems to make development and testing easier.
A code profiler for optimizing code performance.
IDE Scripting for build automation.
A REAL Server unlimited connections license.
Priority technical support.
New licenses include 12 months of updates.
All of the features of REALbasic Professional Edition.

REALbasic 2009 Release 1 (Shipped on March 3, 2009)
REALbasic 2009 Release 1 addes 27 new features and 100 improvements. Also, this release includes a new Quickstart window that helps new users get started developing software in REALbasic.

REALbasic 2008 Release 5 (Shipped on December 9, 2008)
This release adds more than 150 improvements and several new features including both the ability to print source code in color and to duplicate methods, properties and constants. Additionally, users can now write their own tools to completely automate the building of their applications. This release also improves upon auto-complete, a feature that all REALbasic developers use many times a day. Auto-complete now supports namespaces and uses icons to show what is being selected from the auto-complete list.

realbasic autocomplete

REALbasic 2008 Release 4 (Shipped on September 23, 2008)
This release adds over 300 improvements and six new features. The new features are:

Control Locking: Control Locking adds the ability to lock a control in the IDE so it's position and size cannot be edited. This is useful for positioning controls at design time on complex User Interface's to prevent accidentally modifying the control.
Tab Stops: Tab Stops allow users to specify controls to be skipped over when tabbing through the user interface at runtime.
Auto-adjust Tab Indexes: REALbasic can now automatically determine the tab order for all controls.
Warning System Updates: REALbasic now includes several new warnings, as well as a new User Interface to set per-project preferences on what warnings to receive.
Constants in Declarations: The REALbasic compiler now allows the use of constants and enumerations in declarations. For example, constants can now be used as part of a method's optional parameter declaration or to define enumeration values in terms of other constants.
Codesign for Mac OS X Applications: Codesign enables developers to digitally sign REALbasic applications. Digitally signed applications provide greater security because the application can be traced back to the author. One way this is used on the Mac is with Mac OS X Leopard Server. Applications installed on Leopard Server must be authorized by the user each time they are launched. Digitally signed applications need only be authorized once.

REALbasic 2008 Release 3 (Shipped on July 8, 2008)
REALbasic 2008 Release 3 offered several new features, including a new Attributes language feature, an update to the project analyzer to include warnings of deprecated functionality and other code issues, and an integrated profiler (screenshot) that allows programmers to track down performance issues within their applications quickly and without any additional coding. Also included is the ability to add types within classes and several improvements to the recently added introspection functionality.

REALbasic 2008 Release 2 (Shipped on May 6, 2008)
Pairs was introduced in this release, allowing developers to easily define key/value pairs and define linked lists. This release also increases functionality to the introspection features and includes several new capabilities involving remote debugging and bug reporting that simplifies testing and reduces developer overhead.

REALbasic 2008 Release 1 (Shipped on February 11, 2008)
This release introduces the Introspection feature. Introspection provides the ability to determine the type and characteristics of an object at runtime. Properties and methods can be accessed in a generic way without having to know the specific type of that object before the code is compiled. This capability allows for more advanced dynamic programming techniques to be used in REALbasic applications.

REALbasic 2007 Release 5 (Shipped on November 13, 2007)
This release focused on quality, adding more than 100 improvements and support for Apple's Leopard OS.

REALbasic 2007 Release 4 (Shipped on September 10, 2007)
Several new features were introduced from this release, including:

Ubuntu support: Ubuntu version 6.06 and later is now officially supported. REALbasic 2007 Release 4 is now released as a deb package for easy installation on Ubuntu.
Faster ODBC: The ODBC plug-in has been optimized to provide significantly faster performance.
Faster Database Access: The REALbasic database API is now significantly faster when iterating through a recordset using the Field function. When combined with the new ODBC plug-in, customers have reported a 20x speed improvement in the performance of some database operations.
Debugger Improvements: Debugger console applications have been enhanced by the addition of properties that simulate command line arguments. The debug application location may now be set by the developer.
Delegates: New delegate datatype provides an abstract representation of a method, allowing variable implementation of a specific invocation.

REALbasic 2007 Release 3 (Shipped on June 12, 2007)
The REALbasic language and compiler now support namespaces, allowing developers to place classes, interfaces and modules inside modules. This enables the design of more modular, reusable code.

REALbasic 2007 Release 2 (Shipped on April 2, 2007)
This release added several new features, including:

Code Folding: REALbasic now supports collapsing and expanding blocks of code in the code editor. This makes code easier to debug and maintain.
Incremental Compilation: The REALbasic compiler now compiles only the parts of your project that have changed since the last compile. This results in faster compilation and improved developer productivity.
RTF Support: The EditField now supports saving and loading styled text content in the RTF format.
Debugger Improvements: The REALbasic debugger has been improved in several ways. The debugger now show the values of more objects, including RecordSets, ListBoxes, PopupMenus and ComboBoxes, while debugging. The debugger also now allows more application properties and variables to be changed while debugging.
Menu Editor: The Menu Editor now scrolls horizontally and vertically to support the creation of very large menu structures.
Weak References: A weak reference provides a reference to an object while still allowing that object's memory to be reclaimed. A common use for weak references is to implement a cache of objects without requiring that an object be kept alive solely because it appears in the cache.

REALbasic 2007 Release 1 (Shipped on January 2, 2007)
REALbasic 2007 Release 1 was released on January 2, 2007, adding:

Improved Universal Support: Increased reliability on Intel-based Macs.
Improved Database Support: Increased support for REAL SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and ODBC.
New Quicktime Functionality: Allows developers to have increased control when creating and saving editable movies.
Support for HTTPS Proxies: Adds additional security and increased flexibility for networks that require the use of a proxy, allowing for server side operations to accept incoming connections with SSL.
Windows Vista Functionality: REALbasic and applications built with REALbasic will now run on Windows Vista. This release added functionality to make it more consistent with Windows Vista's user interface guidelines.