realbasic or runrev?

[Sarah]

Such a query usually produces a flood of emails, but I'll stick my neck 
out at this stage having been in the same position recently.

For creating the various displays (windows in RB, stacks or cards in 
Rev), the 2 are very similar. RB provides guidelines to fit with Apple's 
Human Interface rules, Rev doesn't.

Like you, I found that having to pre-define and type all variables was 
extremely annoying in RB. It may make a slight difference in final 
performance but it will lengthen your development time.

Where Rev (& any *card) shines is text manipulation. RB has the 
conventional MID, RIGHT, LEFT, INSTR type syntax although it has a 
useful function called NthField. Rev has extremely flexible and fast 
text chunking so that you can do things like:
	get word 2 of item 4 of line 76 of field "Data List"
	sort lines of fld "Addresses" by item 4 of each
and so on.

The RB listBox is good and Rev does not currently have an exact 
equivalent. It has scrolling list fields, but although these can have 
tab-separated columns, text too wide to fit in it's column will 
overflow, pushing the rest of that line over by an extra tab. There are 
work-arounds for this and a real Table object is supposedly on the way.

Rev has database support too, but in most cases it is unnecessary. Store 
your data in fields on a data stack and you will easily be able to 
access it, save it, print or or whatever you need. Rev doesn't have the 
built-in support for MS Office, but any data can be exported to a text 
file and imported into any spreadsheet or word-processor.

Download the Starter Kit and try a sub-section of your app. People here 
are always ready to help with any scripting questions you might have.

Cheers,
Sarah


On Wednesday, April 24, 2002, at 07:39  am, Alex Rice wrote:

> 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
>
>
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