The IDE

REALBasic provides you with an award winining graphical enviroment in which you can easily design your entire project. The REALBasic IDE may seem very different to you at first but it's actually quite similar to Visual Basic's IDE. Once you get familiar with the REALBasic IDE you will be ready to start developing solutions in REALBasic.

The Project window

The Project window in REALBasic is very similar to that of VB. In REALBasic you do not get default folders but instead you can create your own folders and organize your project as needed by dragging the items around into any folder.

From the project window you can delete project items, export project items and add new ones.

To Add an existing item just drag the file from your computer into the project window. In VB every item in your project is an individual file but not in REALBasic. In REALBasic just like in VB 3.0 the entire project is saved in a single binary file. If you want to keep the file as an external item and not copied into the project just hold the command+option key when you drop the file.

To delete an item just select the item and press delete.

To add a new item to the project select one of the many new menu options under the File menu.

In the project window you can also add items like movies, images, rb databases, and Mac resource files. These items become available to you in code in various ways either by their name or by some accesor function or object. See the REALBasic documentation for more information.

Notice also that we have an item called Menu. This is where you add and edit your menus, just double click on it and take a look. REALBasic by default will add a menu to your project.

Perhaps you are used to manage your project using right-click in VB, well that's the one thing you will probably miss the most in REALBasic. Yet all the functionality can be accesed by other means like the ones mentioned above.

The Properties window

The Properties window is used just like in VB. It also allows you to edit menu properties when the menu editor window is open.

When you edit an object or control properties you will notice the property Super. Due to the object oriented nature of REALBasic every control and object has a super or parent class. See the REALBasic's Developers Guide for more information.

Menus

When you double click on your menu item in the project window you will open the visual menu editor.

You edit the menu's properties using the properties window.

To add a new menu or sub menu just select one of the empty boxes (green boxes here) and type either a name or text in the property window. You can select and drag the menu item to move it to a new location.

The code editor is where we write our code. It's some what different but in a better way. The code editor is divided in two panes. The one on the left is a list of all the controls, events on a form, methods (the ones added by you), and properties which are nothing else than global variables in the form, module or class.

When you expand the Control item you will see every control on the form. Expanding any of those controls will show a list of all of the events for that control. Select a particular event and the source code for that event appears in the right.

The Events items are those events that apply to the form or class itself. Like "Open" when the form is loaded, etc.

The Methods items is a list of all the function and subs that you have added to this form, module, or class.

Finally Properties is a list of every variable which is global to this form or class. In the case of a module these properties are global to the entire project.

Modules may also have constants which is a list of all the global constants you define. They have a global scope for the entire project.

last update Dec/2/2002