The company also announced the results of survey data collected from 831 customers as they purchase REALbasic. Of customers who responded to the recent survey, 25% are using REALbasic to port existing applications cross-platform. Of these 25%, nearly half (47%) are using REALbasic to port existing Visual Basic applications.

"This data clearly shows REALbasic is in fact a great tool to use to port existing applications, and especially Visual Basic applications, cross-platform," said Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software. ?In addition, quotes from customers indicate that they are very pleased with REALbasic and its abilities to port existing applications from Windows to Macintosh and Linux."

In addition to the 47% who are using REALbasic to port existing Visual Basic applications, 11% are porting existing applications from C++; 4% from Java, and 20% from others, which includes environments like Delphi, other BASIC-based languages and database development environments. According to Evans Data Research, Visual Basic developers are looking for alternatives to complex environments like .NET. In their recent study (November 2004), more developers in North America use Visual Basic 6 (or earlier) than .NET ? 45% to 34%, respectively.

REALbasic offers these developers a cross-platform alternative as REALbasic's language and environment is very similar to Visual Basic. Customer feedback relating on using REALbasic for porting existing applications were collected during the survey process. Some of them are included below (please note that these comments are direct from the survey responses and may contain cryptic phrases and incomplete sentences) :

REALbasic 5.5.5 is shipping now and includes numerous feature updates and reliability improvements. VB Project Converter has also been updated to help Visual Basic users be even more productive with the process of migrating existing applications. REALbasic 5.5.5 is available now for free to existing REALbasic 5.5 customers.