Valentina and OS-X (Darwin) revisited...

[Scott Raney]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 Greg Saylor <gsaylor at net-virtual.com> wrote:

> A long time ago (8 months or so) I had posted about using Valentina under
> OS-X Darwin...   Unfortunately the lack of this ability has held up my
> project for over a year now - and this was only discovered after having
> purchased Revolution...  So Revolution has basically been a complete bust
> for me due to this issue... ;-(   I even convinced one of my clients to
> purchase a license as well, but thankfully the mistake of purchasing it
> for use as a database application was one that I made on my own dime and
> not my client's...  
> 
> I just tried the revdb under Darwin and it doesn't work either:

Unfortunately you're way off in the weeds here: not only have you not
specified where that DLL is to be loaded (hint, you need to "start
using" a stack to use an external in a console app), but the Darwin
engine doesn't even support resource or bundle-format externals, and
neither revdb nor Valentina have been built in the older format.

> #!Darwin
> 
> on startUp
>         get revdb_connect("Valentina","","faa.vdb")                
>         put "Hello WOrld!" into tresponse
>         put tresponse
> end startUp
> 
> 
> NOTE: If I comment out the "get revdb_connect" line this script does what
> is expected (it prints "Hello World!" to the console)...  If I don't I
> get the following result:
> 
> [host100:Revolution 1.1.1/components/engines] root# ./test
> Darwin exiting on signal 10
> [host100:Revolution 1.1.1/components/engines] root#

This is a bug: it should give you an execution error report here (not
that this helps you much because it still wouldn't work).

Your problems are complicated by the fact that RR was never upgraded
to the MetaCard 2.4.3 Carbon engine, which is the only one you have
any hope of getting externals to work in CGI mode with.  Even then, I
don't know if revdb will work with it and am sure that it's not
supported even if it did.

Note that I *do* think you could get this to work using the VXCMD
external directly with the MetaCard 2.4.3 Carbon engine, however.  Not
that we're volunteering to provide support for this, seeing as how you
didn't buy MetaCard ;-)  Maybe the developers of VXCMD can help you...

> What this all comes down to is that I have to get this project start --
> which should have been finished by now.. And my Revolution license which
> has been doing nothing but collecting dust is coming up for renewal...
> 
> Is it possible to either use Valentina with the Darwin engine or at least
> to get the OS-X engine to function correctly from the command line?  

The latter I believe to be possible.  Note that this whole area is
still in flux, though, and you'll have to do things a little
differently for the upcoming MC 2.5/RR 2.0 release because the Carbon
engine is now Mach-O format and so will require a different external
format (a bundle).

> It remains baffling to me that the developers of these respective
> products have not yet integrated their products to work together at the
> command-line...  Practically every database product worth any amount of
> salt has the ability to manipulate the data using command-line tools...

Keep in mind that you're not using a database product, you're using an
application development environment.  Since 99% of the work done with
MC/RR is graphical, you've kind of got to expect a certain roughness
if you're going to use if for something else.  About all I can
guarantee is that you'll find doing CGI in MC/RR a lot easier than
doing GUI development in Perl ;-)

> It is enough of a burden to have to learn this new transcript language
> and development environment which is extremely inefficient (at least to
> me)...  I like to have vi open in one window and execute my scripts from
> another window.. The fact that I have to keep draggin' a mouse all over
> the screen just to get something to work is simply a distraction -
> especially when trying to conceptualize some process which should operate
> entirely automated without any human interaction....

This all works fine: no need to use the graphical IDE to develop your
scripts.  But you do have to use the Darwin engine (no external
support) or the newest MC Carbon engines.

As an aside, and not that you need yet another thing to learn, but
using vi for application development is strictly for lightweights
IMHO.  Real programmers use Emacs ;-)

> However, the MacOSPPC engine does not seem to accept "scripts" because it
> just starts up the development environment instead of executing the
> code.....  (THis would probably be the best solution - to make the
> MacOSPPC engine work like a UNIX engine when called from a command-line
> script, if possible)...

This is not even theoretically possible: there is no stdio support in
the Classic OS.
  Regards,
    Scott

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...