Reports DataPro, Rev, and Blender3D

[Brad Allen]

At 8:44 PM -0500 8/18/04, Jim Witte wrote:
>   Hmm..  Anybody else see www.blender3d.com? The creator of the popular 3d
>modeling program (the page says over 250,000 registered users) has reached
>an agreement with the people who know own it (NaN Holdings) to open the
>source code as GPL if he can raise 100,000 Euros.  I'm not exactly sure what
>the history of Blender is, or how NaN came to hold it (read slashdot..), but
>NaN, like Reports, was not doing much with it.  The Blender foundation,
>after only 4 weeks, has already rasised over 80,000 (in intent, actual
>donations in the bank are about 60,000).
>
>   Maybe that's what's needed for Reports.

Open-sourcing Reports Datapro is an interesting idea. I wonder if it 
would be major undertaking to adapt it for Rev in such a way that it 
would work with Rev and Rev standalones.

I recently delved back into Reports Datapro, and found myself once 
again really appreciating the functionality, including the ability to 
generate reports on plain textual data (as opposed to HyperCard 
stacks.) Reports Datapro is a great software package with many 
features beyond just reporting (indexing, sort & select, table views, 
etc.). If the Rev folks are considering adding reporting 
capabilities, I hope they'll take a close look at the design of 
Reports Datapro.

I suppose we have some alternatives for reporting data out of Rev; 
for instance, Rev can output delimited text to a specified directory 
and then launch a FileMaker standalone which could automatically 
import text from the specified directory and generate a report. Of 
course, FileMaker developer costs $500. I wonder if there currently 
exist any good open source programs that Rev could hook into for 
generating reports?