realbasic or runrev?

[Alex Rice]

Hi, I'm developing a large application in REALbasic. I've recently 
become aware of RuntimeRev. and I think it might be a good alternative 
to RB for this type of app. I don't know *card development, so I am 
wondering how you *card developers think about apps such as this one:

This app has about 50 screens. The user is asked roughly 250 questions: 
multiple choice, text and selection type of questions, and the responses 
are stored in a REALdatabase. (a rather poor but small and embedded 
relational database). After answering the questions, the app calculates 
some reports (a bunch of not very complex math and lots of 
if-statements). The reports functions use CSV comma-separated data files 
for storing lookup tables of constant values. The reports are roughly 
500 lines x 6 columns. The report can be viewed within a listBox control 
(you might call it a tableview or a spreadsheet control) The app can 
also export the report to a formatted Excel file using MS Office 
Automation.

RB's strengths: In RB, I discovered that creating the numerous screens 
and linking the controls to the database fields went extremely fast.

RB's weaknesses: In RB I discovered that the static typing and 
pre-declared variables made a big dent in my productivity as I started 
coding the numerical calculations and the tedious job of hand-formatting 
the reports, in both sending data to the ListBox and sending data to the 
Excel export.

So that's the project. Are there any methodologies or plugins or 
conventional bits of wisdom how this app could be more easily produced 
in RunRev?

TIA

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alex_rice at arc.to
alrice at swcp.com