Revolution and Internet Applications

Dan Shafer dan at danshafer.com
Mon Apr 8 03:11:01 EDT 2002


The applications I envision building over the next year or two are 
all Internet and Web-based applications. They provide non-browser 
approaches to dealing with information stored in Web pages and on 
Internet sites in databases and other formats. So the Internet 
capabilities of my tool set are crucial.

As I probe Revolution's documentation and build small test stacks, I 
seem to be finding that this particular aspect of Revolution is not 
(yet) well-developed.

For example, not only is the htmlText property very weak in terms of 
the tag support it offers, it appears to me that it doesn't support 
even those limited tags it claims to. Specifically, the <a></a> tag 
set appears to be unsupported, at least under OS X. Clicking on text 
that is connected to a link in the original Web page does not 
generate an automatic link to the new page. I presume this could be 
scripted but it's difficult to see how: (a) this could be a 
general-case solution; and (b) one can claim to support a standard 
HTML tag but not its associated behavior.

Similarly, the <image> tag does not seem to work, either. At least 
the image never gets displayed on any of several Web pages I've tried 
it with.

Beyond that, general Internet support seems to be lacking.  Of 
course, there could be more than meets the eye; without a manual, 
it's hard to say. The scripting dictionary is useful, but there's no 
categorization so I can't, e.g., easily find a list of all 
net-related stuff. I keep having to follow "see also" links that 
sometimes don't go anywhere useful and often don't have links back to 
where I was. Or at least so it seems.

None of this should be seen as an indictment of Revolution, though. 
As a long-time HyperTalker, I'm really excited by what I see here. I 
am hoping to find out that I'm just wrong about this stuff and that 
Revolution can in fact be the development tool I seek. But after a 
few hours of exploration, I'm inclined to think it's not yet ready 
for prime time for the kinds of apps I want to build.

Anyone have a different experience or some insights to share?
-- 
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Dan Shafer
Technology Visionary - Technology Assessment - Documentation
"Looking at technology from every angle"
http://www.danshafer.com
831-392-1127 Voice - 831-401-2531 Fax




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