Using Revolution for LARGE projects

[Igor Couto]

Dear Revolution Experts,

I am considering using Revolution as a development tool in a large 
project, but am hesitant because of the apparent lack of complex 
applications made with Revolution - apart from Revolution itself. Most 
applications I've been able to locate on the web that are made with 
Revolution seem to be relatively small.

I was wondering whether anyone participating in this list has used 
Revolution to develop a LARGE, COMPLEX application. To give you an idea 
of the size and level of complexity I am considering, here is a bit of 
information on the software package in question:

It is basically an integrated medical practice management system. The 
program will:
a) Store daily appointments for doctors, and display daily and weekly 
charts.
b) Manage an electronic waiting list of patients by order of arrival
c) Keep patients' clinical records (including scans of x-rays)
d) Keep an administrative to-do list
e) Maintain patients' accounts and financial information
f) Provide statistical information on doctors, patients, and the clinic
g) Issue a variety of printed reports, including invoices, receipts, 
statements, patient history, consultation schedule, etc.
h) Multi-user (networked)
i) Issue alarms and notifications

Because the product must be cross-platform (Macintosh and Windows), I 
have been weighting the pros and cons of both RealBasic and Revolution 
- as these seem to be the most feature-full and robust cross-platform 
development environments around. While RealBasic seemed appealing at 
first, I soon stumbled across several limitations, some of which would 
eventually compromise both the user interface, and the design of the 
application. Revolution seems to have all the user-interface 
functionality we want built-in (or easily customisable or 
programmable), however I haven't been able to ascertain whether it 
would be:

1) Sufficiently MANAGEABLE in a large project: are Revolution-based 
projects just as easy to manage and maintain as projects developed with 
a 'normal' object-oriented language? Are there more debugging and 
maintenance problems in Revolution because of the lack of strong data 
types? Is it sufficiently easy to apply object-oriented concepts of 
application design (specifically classes and data structures) in 
Revolution?

2) Sufficiently FAST: what database should we use as the back-end? 
Valentina? MySQL? And considering that some of the windows in our 
applications are going to be making several simultaneous queries to the 
server, and then updating tens of objects in the interface (graphs, 
option menus, tables, summary fields, etc.). Do you believe that a 
Revolution interface can be made sufficiently fast and responsive - or 
will the user always be dealing with some lag and screen refresh issues?

3) Sufficiently RELIABLE: the application will be absolutely 
mission-critical, so reliability is a major concern. How stable and 
reliable are complex applications made with Revolution?


Any experiences you have that might help in pointing me in the right 
direction would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks in advance,
--
Igor de Oliveira Couto
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igor at pixelmedia.com.au
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