Back to business

It's been a long time since I've been blogging on any of my blog pages.

So, now that I've been at it again on the BASIC Programming blog, I posted the following information below when someone inquired about Run BASIC, so it only makes sense to post it here also.

The essential concept of Run BASIC that it is an all-in-one BASIC web application server.  You can use it to create a dynamic web site, or to host in-house applications for your business or school, or use it to control your home.  The possibilities are pretty much endless.

Here is a link to a white paper about Run BASIC.
    http://www.libertybasic.com/RunBASICBreakthrough.pdf

Here is a link to the Run BASIC community forum.
    http://runbasic.proboards.com/

Drawing Graphics - Lesson 4

Drawing graphics is a powerful and fun feature of programming languages, and Run BASIC makes it easy to do this in a web application.

To do this we use the GRAPHIC statement to create a graphical object. Then we call methods on that object. The term 'method' is another way of saying a function that is tied to a kind of object. Once we've drawn something we can tell Run BASIC to embed the graphic into the web page by using the RENDER statement.

Here is a very simple Run BASIC program that draws a graphic.

'draw a graphic 200 by 200
graphic #pattern, 200, 200
for x = 0 to 200 step 10
#pattern line(x, 0, 0, 200-x)
#pattern line(0, x, x, 200)
#pattern line(x, 0, 200, x)
#pattern line(x, 200, 200, 200-x)
next x
render #pattern
end

Here is what the drawn graphic looks like!

Next lesson we will add a graphical drawing to our hypotenuse calculator.

A Simple Interactive Web Application - Lesson 1

One thing that Run BASIC does better than most other web programming systems is interactive applications where a program asks the user for a piece of information at a time and produces answers as you go. This is the way a lot of non-web applications work but it is hard to create these kinds of apps using conventional web programming.

Here is Run BASIC source code for a simple web application that computes the length of a hypotenuse for a right triangle if the length of the other two sides are known.

[startHere]
print "Hypotenuse Calculator"
print
input "Length of side A"; a
input "Length of side B"; b
c = sqr(a^2+b^2)
print "Length of hypotenuse (side C) = "; c
print
input "Compute another (Y/N)"; yn$
if yn$ = "Y" or yn$ = "y" then
cls
goto [startHere]
end if
print "Goodbye."
end

If you're completely new to web programming you may not realize that the above code doesn't look like code for a web app. In fact it looks very much like code for a QBasic program. If you're an experienced web programmer you may be scratching your head because it looks too simplistic to be a web program, but it is a web program.

Run BASIC does its best to hide the hard stuff that most web programming systems force the programmer to deal with. If you really must use some special web development technique Run BASIC provides ways to do that too and we'll cover some of these in later posts. Most of the time it isn't necessary because Run BASIC does the heavy lifting for you.