XCMD ? Plugins? what?...

[Mark Paris]

XCMD ? Plugins? what?...Greg,

Well, as a revolution user with no prior metacard/hypercard experience, and some VB experience, I can agree with you on a lot of your points.  My main area of development is for the web, so I'm familiar with perl, php, asp, frontier etc.  I'm not sure if an xcmd is akin to an xwing fighter, but I'm guessing it's not.

I think you can find info on writing to/reading from text files in the docs, though not as easily as perhaps it should be, as you state.  As for databases, I'll totally agree, it is cryptic at best.  The valentina engine looks good to me too, but I haven't even attempted it yet.  And I THOUGHT I read that it was included in the latest build of revolution?  Did I imagine that?  Lol.

I'm certainly not bashing revolution or its docs.  It is an AWESOME program.  And I think there are many ways to do certain tasks (such as reading file contents into a variable).  The docs are in their infancy really, and I expect that the dialogues in this list are going to shape them a great deal in the future.  I think it's attracted a lot of seasoned programmers, so the topics are often over my head, but I still read them and pretend I might comprehend them.  Maybe there does need to be some "newbie" documentation, separate from the main docs.  Maybe some of us on the list could put something together like that.  Food for thought.

And speaking of docs, did you see Sivakatirswami's post on CGI's (thanks for that!)  ----   ok, there is no "released" documentation, so how did that information come to be?!  Egads!  Is there an "unreleased" source somewhere?!  Lol.  

Anyway, I'm thoroughly enjoying learning from this list and all of it's contributors.

Mark




----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Greg Saylor 
  To: 'use-revolution at lists.runrev.com ' 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 5:03 AM
  Subject: XCMD ? Plugins? what?...


  Hello, 

  I hope my emails are finally not HTML formatted....   If they are it might be because I am using a web client as I write this -- so I apologize ahead of time....

  Anyways, I have been looking for a good cross-platofrm database solution that works with Revolution (mostly I am worried about the Mac and Windows piece, with UNIX there are a lot more options it would seem)....

  What I came across was this Valentina database, which looks really compelling to me.. But, for the life of me I have no clue what to do with what I have downloaded .. How to even install it....  Is it a plugin?.. What is the difference between a plugin and a xcmd (or a vxcmd for that matter?)...  it was it can use two api's.. The vxcmd api or the REVDB api...   

  I have a feeling that if I could just get this thing installed and get the samples to work I might be able to figure it out, but no matter where I stick this file called "Valentina Engine" it just doesn't seem to do anything different.. When I go to the plugins editor of Revolution all I see is "revexamples.rev" ...  I have tried to get this working on Windows, Mac OS-X, and OS-9.. And iI just can't make any sense out of it.....

  Am I missing something in the documentation because it seems like everyone must know how to install this stuff because no matter how many sites I have visited not one of them has any sort of installation instructions....  It's really quite confusing to me.. ;-( 

  I feel compelled to offer up some constructive criticism: I definately have to say that the documentation in Revolution/MetaCard seems really lacking...   There should be some guidelines for 3rd party developers to write a simple text file or something (anything!) with installation instructions at the very least....  If Revolution is going to compete with Visual Basic (which it seems fully capable of doing) then this documentation problem really needs some solving....  I'd even be willing to do it, but unfortunately I can't make anything work... It's like everytime I need to do something I have to email this list server for an answer -- granted the responses I've gotten are absolutely phenomenal but it does seem like there are some very critical pieces of information which are missing.. It took me less time to install Oracle for my first time then it did to figure out how to deal with this plugin/xmcmd/cxmcsd/vxcmd/xcmd/whatever it is....  PERL modules seem almost a breeze to compile and install compared to this... Am I just thinking about all of this the wrong way or is there a problem here?....

  - Greg 

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