My Nigeria trip at the end of September really put some work on hold until I got back.  Thankfully I have some really cool (and patient) clients that are flexible in their schedule and were accommodating to the change in schedule due to travel and as a couple of emergency projects showed up.

Then we sold our house that had been on the market since June.  Then we bought a house (24 hours later).  And then moved out (and in to the new house) less than 2 and a half weeks later.  Even our Real Estate agent (who does 120 homes a year) says that this sequence is fast, fast, fast!  The one positive note is that the movers complimented us by saying we were “really organized” and I’d say so as in less than 48 hours we are about 85% unpacked.

Prospective clients keep showing up and asking for quotes.  There are a LOT of people asking for quotes from us to take their VB6 applications and rewrite them into Real Studio.  Most are scared away by the price (because there are no conversion tools so it’s really a rewrite) but a few have been serious enough to continue the conversation.

It really is a good time to be a Real Studio developer.  Every developer I know is busy and that’s a really good thing.  If you are not part of the Real Software Developer Referral Program you should be as it’s a great way to get leads.  One project and it pays for itself.

I barely have things unpacked from the house move and I’m off to the Real Studio Database Days training in Frankfurt, Germany where I’ll do a short presentation on our ActiveRecord implementation.  I must be crazy.

• Stéphane Pinel from Real Software
• Geoff Perlman from Real Software (via video chat)
• Jens Boschulte from DynaForms GmbH
• Simon Larkin from QiSQL
• Thomas Tempelmann
• Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software

Currently there are over 30 people registered from eight countries including Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and the USA.  This is a good time of the year to get away.

More info can be found at http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/events/#database days

After checking flight costs there’s a possibility I’ll be there.  If I do, I’ll do a short presentation on our REALbasic implementation of ActiveRecord.  If you’ve not used it, ActiveRecord lets you use auto-complete of your tables/fields in the Real Studio IDE, takes advantage of the strong type-casting in Real Studio and, takes advantage of REALbasic events.

It’s been an interesting 10 days.  If you follow the blog at all you know I was contracted to train a group of developers on Real Studio.  The location?  Nigeria.

Most of the people following me thought it was a joke.  People really go to Nigeria?  On purpose?  The answer is yes!

I’ll start by saying that my week in Nigeria exceeded all of my expectations.  I went in with very low expectations so it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised.

Like many of my fellow Americans my view of Africa is skewed.  As a child of the 70′s my first glimpse of Africa was the old TV show Tarzan.  I don’t watch much modern television but the images of African on the Discovery Channel and the news networks still left me with the mindset of African being filled with mud buildings with thatch huts, dirt streets, lots of poor people, and crime everywhere.  Sally Struthers infomercials also cast a pretty poor view on African (not that she’s wrong but it’s not what my experience was).

My visits was to Lagos, Nigeria home of 9 million people (possibly much more).  It is a Democratic Republic modeled after the United States but only since 1999 when military rule ended.  Almost to a person, the Nigerians I talked to criticized the government for having a lack of leadership.  I find it ironic that we, as Americans, are having similar conversations about our 200+ year old democracy.

Lagos, in general, is a pretty modern city.  It has the longest bridge in Africa at 11.8 km that was built in 1990.  While it might not be up to American standards, it’s in good shape with only a few potholes.  If only the rest of their highway system was as up-to-day.  Unfortunately, the rest of the paved highway system is riddled with potholes though the ride to and from the airport was by far the worst, in my opinion.

Once you get off the paved roads you get to dirt roads (even in the city).  This is where the big, vehicle swallowing potholes exist.  Drivers avoid them at all costs so this means vehicles making wide swings around them.  If this means going into the oncoming traffic, well, that’s okay too.

The traffic is pretty bad on the highways and side streets and are packed during the morning and evening rush hours.  While there are traffic lights on Lagos Island (which really isn’t an island from what I gather) there are very few, if any, outside of that area.  Even the ones that ARE there don’t mean much as drivers blow through the red lights.  The highways might be marked for 3 lanes, but during the rush hours there are easily 5 lanes of traffic.  Round-abouts seem chaotic but there is an odd rhythm to merging.  Drivers use their horns on a constant basis.

Toyota and Honda vehicles are everywhere.  To a lesser extent there are Misubishi, Hundai, Volkswagon, and Mercedes Benes.  What is glaringly evident is there are NO American cars, of any sort, in any condition, anywhere to be found.  My only conclusion is that the American car companies are ignoring the Nigeria.  Is this true of rest of Africa?  I don’t know but it’s a shame Ford, GM, and Chrysler aren’t even trying to compete here.

Lagos has a lot of issues that it needs to solve.  Lack of education of a population that averages 19 years of age will haunt them for a long time.  Public education is not very good and those that can afford it send their kids to private schools.  Not everyone has access to running water and drinking water is even scarcer.  Bottled water is a necessity and street vendors sell water (of unknown quality) from big containers they push around in carts.

Power is inconsistent, at best.  This forces those that can afford it, to run generators.  For a business it’s a necessity to have one since power might be off for days.  The power poles in residential areas are a mish-mash of electrical cables strung up haphazardly.  There was more than one occasion where I saw sparks showering down from a pole.  In my opinion, the only way to fix this is to start over from scratch and build a new grid – an audacious project.

The police are not necessarily your friends.  I went to a busy market one afternoon and we were pulled over by the police.  As I was saying to a friend, this might be the first case I’ve ever been pulled over for “driving while white.”  After the initial indignation and some arguing my host and driver apologized profusely and asked what the fine was and we ‘got off’ for 1000 Nairra (~ $10 USD).  I saw plenty of other instances where the police were taking ‘fine money’ on the spot both in the street and in the airport.

The company I was doing the training for employees a lot of people.  Their offices were as modern and efficient as most I see in the states.  They make a variety of food products and during a tour of their facilities I was impressed with how clean they were and were comparable (mostly) to food processing facilities I’ve worked at in the States.  I was amazed at how many people worked an average ‘line’.  We’d most likely have one or two people running a line where they would have six but my guess is those six work for much, much less than what our two Americans would.

The IT folks I was doing the training for were pretty sharp guys.  They caught on to Real Studio very quickly and by the end of the week were using Real Studio to create a simple CRUD application for invoices (with relational data) using both the Desktop Edition and Web Edition.  They were pretty happy with it its ease of use and its ability to create any type of application using the business logic they wanted (rather than the enforced business logic of their current tool).

The Nigerians working for this company represent where the country could go, in my opinion.  They have a stable job, learning some valuable skills, and have a thirst for more.  They have extra money at the end of the month that they can spend on things.  They want their kids to have a better life than what they’ve had (don’t we all!?).  This sounds a lot like middle class America.

Obviously the company they work for is investing a ton of resources into the African continent and it’s paying off for them.  They sell their product in most of African (which is 50-some countries in total).  If the trend continues, this burgeoning middle class will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

The company I did the training for deals with a lot of guests from other parts of African and Europe.  They had protocol people pick me up and drop me off at the airport and helping me through Nigerian customs.  They had a guest flat with a cook (who in my opinion could be a top chef in the states).  They also provided a driver (thank God giving the road conditions).  I say all this because I never once, felt unsafe in my trip (okay the police shaking us down for money made me a little nervous).

I had an enjoyable experience.  I didn’t get sick on any food and I was in air conditioning the entire time.  If I was invited to go to Nigeria again would I?  If it was for a company in Lagos that is used to hosting foreigners and expats I’d do some checking and probably say yes.  Would I do work again for this same company?  In a heartbeat.

Again, sorry for the rambling account.  There are just SO many differences and similarities that it’s hard to remember them all.

I guess I must be getting older (and wiser?) because every now and then I leave my comfort zone on purpose.  I always get more out of the experience than I bargained for though not always in the way I expect.

Today, I embark on one of those radical departures from my comfort zone.  I am going to Nigeria to do Real Studio training for a company thinking about switching to Real Studio for their business needs.  This is a great opportunity for me to teach (something I like doing) about a product I spend a lot of time using.  Getting to travel when someone else is paying is even better.  I’ve managed to do this for London and Hong Kong in addition to many US and Canadian cities too numerous to mention.

This will be an interesting adventure.  I’ve never been to Africa and I’m going to a place that has a State Department travel warning.  Oh joy.  But, I believe (and hope) that my hosts are taking good care of me and handling security.  Since they seem to do this for their European bigwigs I don’t expect that to be a problem.  But I do have addresses and phone numbers for the US Embassy and other security ‘options’.  Never hurts to have a plan B.

The joys of international travel begins with the immunizations.  I joke that I’m now prepared for any sort of post apocalyptic disaster when the diseases hit.

Unlike my year long stay in Hong Kong 15 years ago where the internet was still kind of special, I fully expect I’ll be ‘online’ for a good portion of my stay.  It will be interesting to see how well all that works as I’ve been told to expect power outages and variable internet connectivity.

Speaking of the internet:  I like to joke with people that I’m going to Nigeria to go find that damn prince that keeps sending me all those emails!

By nature I’m an introvert and I am a little concerned that one of most populous cities in Africa will be overwhelming.  It wasn’t a big deal in Hong Kong so I don’t expect to be a problem here, but you just never know.  The other thing that could take some getting used to is being the clear and obvious minority.  In Hong Kong it wasn’t too bad because there were Brit’s everywhere and they were just part of the environment.  I don’t think I’ll be afforded the same luxury on this trip.

I work for myself so I don’t talk a lot.  I know that when I do my training videos and I spend 3 or 4 hours talking into a computer I have to be careful and drink extra water so the pipes don’t start to hurt.  I’ll be training for 8 hours a day for 5 days so it could be rough.  Add in that I can’t drink the tap water and it will be even more interesting.

Packing for an overseas trip is harder than a domestic trip.  If you go to Chicago and forget your deodorant you pop into your local Walmart (even gas station) and just pick some up.  I don’t know, does Nigeria even have Walmart or a local equivalent?

Anyway, I look forward to this adventure.  I’m sure it will generate many stories and laughter (at my expense probably) and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

I’m sure I’ll give an update once I’m back.  Happy coding!

Take for example, this report that comes with the examples folder.  It has a number of layered controls (meaning the controls have a parent) and in this case, their are quite a few ReportLabel and ReportField controls on a ReportRectangle.  In the layout editor this isn’t a big deal because the layout is simple.  Click on any one of the controls and you can get its properties.

  However, once you get into the code editor, all you see is a list of controls, sorted by name.  There is absolutely no hierarchy that you can deduce from the list.  It’s a major headache for complex layouts, in my opinion.

In my ideal world I’d love the ability to right-click on the item in the code editor and select ‘reveal’ (or similar) and have the layout editor displayed with the control selected.  It would solve some headaches such as the occasional hiccup where Real Studio puts the child control outside of the visible region of the parent.  When that happens, you can no longer see it.  So  how does one ‘select’ the control to either move it, delete it, or otherwise edit it?

You can easily do the opposite case.  In the layout editor, right click on a control and use the “Edit Code” submenu to quickly get to an event in the code editor.  However, for some reason, I rarely use this command.

The contextual menu (i.e. right-click) in the layout editor provides some nifty commands that you might not be aware of.  The one we’re interested in, in this case, is the Select menu.

What the Select menu does, is give you a listing of all the controls, in their hierarchical, and alphabetical order.  So in this example from one of my current projects shows a relatively simple hierarchy with a GroupBox control (SSFrame6) hosting two canvas controls (cvsHusband, cvsWife) hosting DateControls, Labels, RadioButtons and Pushbuttons.

In some instances, this might be the only way that I could select one of the controls.  It’s easy enough to screw it up.  Make the canvas big enough to fit all the controls in it and then reposition it and resize it so that none of the other controls are visible.

Once this happens you’ll never ‘see’ the control in the layout editor but the code behind the controls might be firing anyway (for example if you have code in their open events) which might cause some issues.

While I’m here I’ll make a plea for some common sense naming conventions.  If you take a look at the RS example, GasReport.rbp above, you’ll notice that all the controls are using their default names.  At a glance you can’t tell what Field1 vs Field10 does.  This is one of those things that drives me crazy!

I see too many OPC (Other Peoples Code) projects every month to condone this behavior.  If I were to get this project to fix, the first thing I’d do is name the major controls (I might skip labels – but only if they’re not referenced in code) so when I see them in the code editor I can, from a glance, see what their intent is.

I know this is nit-picky, but I see it time and time again.  If you’ve subscribed to my Real Studio Video Training Series, you’ll note that I rarely leave the controls with their default name.  The few times I do I tend to apologize for breaking my own ‘rule’.  My thought behind this rule is that I’m not only coding for now, but for five years from now when I open the project again.  I don’t want to have to switch between the code and layout editors to figure out what a pushbutton does.  If it’s named properly I can tell its function.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox.  I hope you learned something.

Any tricks that you’ve discovered in the IDE?

For desktop apps they can point to the IDE itself as what you can do with the product.  Web Edition needs examples, working, on their website, that do something.  If they really want to get people to buy their product the really need to have working examples.

What say you?

The Real Studio download package comes with several hundred example projects.  These examples range from very useful to downright useless (in my opinion) but they’re there for people to explore and use.  So in other words, the example may or may not be all that helpful depending upon your skill level.

So my question of the day is why are these part of the download package/installer and not available in a special section of the Real Software website?  It would save on download sizes and it would become a centralized location for Real Studio examples.  Ideally, anyone could contribute to this list.

When we started ARBP and added the Source Code Repository, this was the intention.  I wanted it to be the Planet Source Code of Real Studio projects.  The ARBP source code repository has over a hundred projects and gets a fair amount of traffic and downloads.  The drawback is that few people contributed to it and the older projects are really showing their age.  The other drawback is that it’s NOT Real Software and despite only needing an account to use it a lot of people shy away.

The leading argument against such a page on Real Software’s website are the Real Studio users themselves.  There is a tendency for Real Studio users to complain (loudly) when the examples don’t work.  They are justified, in my opinion, since examples in the download package should work with the version of Real Studio in the download package.  To me, if it’s in the download package it implies that it works implicitly with that version of Real Studio.  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works and sometimes leaves new users with a bad taste in their mouths.

A projects repository web page doesn’t have this problem as the person uploading the project sets the version of Real Studio it was created with and perhaps what operating system and adds some tags to it or something like that.  How cool would it be to upload the project file(s), have an RS web app scan it, pull out the keywords and make it part of a searchable system?  Of course it would allow other users to vote and leave comments.

I post a fair bit in the Real Software forums.  Often times I point to the relevant information the poster needs in the Real Software wiki or to various 3rd party developer websites.  I could see a projects page doing something similar and allow me to link to the project that would help the poster out.

Another thought would be to make this a Web Edition application since essentially we’re talking about a web app that’s a front end to a database.  Perfect place for a WE we app in my opinion.

Could ARBP do this?  Of course they could and it was discussed, in-depth, at the Atlanta conference in March.  They could do it – I have no doubt since they have some pretty smart people in ARBP – I just don’t think ARBP should be the one doing it.  I’m arguing that Real Software is a better and more logical entity to host this thing.

The Real Studio community isn’t as large as Visual Basic – that’s just simple math.  You could argue that a mere percentage or two of users would ever contribute to the projects page and that probably true.  However, assuming that Real Software sticks around for a few more decades, I would argue that one contribution a month is more than what we have now and more examples are better.

What say you?

Real Studio doesn’t have database binding like Visual Basic 6 but it’s not a real big deal.  If anything, the lack of binding makes the code more explicit (i.e. easier to read) and you don’t have to go hunting through control properties to find table and field names.  The Real Studio database classes are generic so it doesn’t matter, generally, what database you’re connecting to.  The drawback to the lack of binding and the generic classes is that it does lend itself to creating the same code over and over and over again.

Because of the nature of Real Studio many users tend to put their db code into the form (window) and tie it to controls.  This leads to spaghetti code with the database specific code all over the place and makes changes to your database harder.  Seth has done two presentations at ARBP conferences 2009, 2011 and introduced attendees to ActiveRecord that we’ve used for years now.

Active Record is a very simple, and limited Object Relational Model (ORM) system.  It allows us to create REALbasic classes that the IDE knows about.  It’s not exceptionally strong with the relational data, or large blobs, but it can be programmed to handle it.

In a new project we’re converting an existing Visual Basic 6 project with roughly 25 tables and several tables have over a hundred fields each.  Using conventional means it would mean having a database editor open so I can copy and paste field names all the time.  However, using ActiveRecord we created the classes (we have a utility to do this) and now the IDE knows the table and field names.  This makes coding very fast and they’re is no worrying about spelling errors and there’s no longer any issue of what the data type is because the class knows what it is.  This is nice since the compiler will pick up any many errors that may not usually find until runtime.

The client was ecstatic after the conversion since he figured that would have taken about 20 hours to convert the VB6 code into something useable in RB.  Instead, between our utility and ActiveRecord it took me less than 4 hours.  So now instead of spending all the time getting classes ready, we’re doing the real work of connecting up the UI to a set of data aware classes.

Another feature that was added was to flag the developer if a field is in the database that isn’t in the class.  How many times do you add a field to the database (or a coworker does) and you forget to hook it up.  This doesn’t happen using ActiveRecord.  You can have class properties that aren’t a field, but if you delete a field property that’s been used in the application the compiler will flag you on it and that’s very useful too.

ActiveRecord makes extensive use of Shared Methods so that all of the database code for that table is access from that class and that class only.  It has a number of methods built-in such as getting a list of rows (in array form) and finding a record by the primary key.  It’s easily extensible.

Like I said earlier, it’s not perfect.  It doesn’t handle relational data at all, but it can be modified to do so.  Large blobs can slow it down, but in the few times this has been a big deal we’ve implemented ‘lazy loading’ where we don’t load that particular field until we ask for it.

We have a single tutorial page up for it now at the main website.  We’ll eventually turn this into video tutorials and we’ll demonstrate it in more video’s.  It’s an MIT style license so feel free to use it.  If you have additions and suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

More information, and downloadable classes can be found at http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic/activerecord

If you were interested in that sort of thing, would you prefer:

1. That we  (BKeeney Software) set the topic a week or so in advance and post it
2. Allow the potential audience to submit questions beforehand and we pick the ones we want to cover
3. Do an ad-hoc question and answer session the day of the seminar
4. Combination of 1, 2, 3
5. Something completely different

From my standpoint, #1 is the easiest for me.  #2 isn’t so bad and #3 has disaster written all over it due to the randomness involved.  I could see some wise-guy showing up and asking me to code something and then criticize me for a) being slow or b) doing it in a way they wouldn’t (meaning they knew how to code it to begin with).

I could see recording them and serving them up for later playback.  I could also see using these as opportunities to explore some of the 3rd party controls and libraries out there and inviting their developers on to talk about them.  Regardless, I think this is an area that could use some exploration.

So before I go down the proverbial rabbit hole on this, what say you?  What am I not thinking about?