So what is REALbasic support going to be like for Valentina in 2010?Almost a decade ago, I became acquainted with a brilliant database engineer named Ruslan Zasukhin who had recently released a C++ SDK for a powerful database system and technology called Valentina. At the time, my business development company Proactive International was introducing REALbasic into many international markets where REALbasic would ship into retail outlets. REALbasic wasn’t really cross-platform then, though the potential was there given its roots as CrossBasic. Proactive International (which gets more mention on my personal blog) got REALbasic published in German, Italian, French, Japanese and…wait for it…Dutch through our channel partners, and you could find a box of REALbasic in every major market in Europe and in every major computer store in Japan.
I convinced Ruslan to port his early release to work with REALbasic, in what I believe was the first third party database for REALbasic. It took some work, because Ruslan was already familiar with the few development tools supporting the Macintosh, and REALbasic was a relative unknown.
Since those dot com years, Ruslan and I formed Paradigma Software Incorporated and Proactive International parted ways with REAL Software. I can’t remember the last time I saw a box of REALbasic anywhere.
Paradigma continues to support REALbasic to date, though the recent rumblings in the REALbasic user community cause us quite a bit of concern. Bob Keeney is a long time REALbasic developer and manages the Association of REALbasic Professionals, and he’s concerned about the state of REALbasic. Christian over at Pariah Software also has some concerns as well. They both lament the poor third party support, and Christian details the number of cancelations of REALbasic oriented events. I also recall there being some staffing shrinkage in the last 12 months as well at REAL Software.
Paradigma Software is going to continue across the board support for REALbasic in 2010. You can connect to Valentina Office Server, Valentina Embedded Server and local databases using the VClient for REALbasic. Plus, Valentina Reports will continue to be available for REALbasic users. Supporting REALbasic has not been an easy task over the most recent years as Paradigma Software has been treated as a competitor than as a (third party supporting) partner by REAL Software.
Being a Valentina developer also means you can easily reuse your database investment with almost every other cross platform tool on the market. For web applications, you have PHP and Ruby on Rails. For client-server, or local applications – its an open field with Valentina: Runrev (aka Runtime Revolution), .net (C# and other CLR languages), Adobe Director, Visual C++, Xcode/C++, Xcode/Objective-C/Cocoa, COM and more – even iPhone – every major environment on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
At the end of the day – it is about how you treat your data, and Paradigma Software customers know that. We’ve spent a good portion of 2009 working on fixing and improving the things our customers ask us about, and added additional staff as a result. There will be another solid release in 2009 that will be very welcome by our customers.
