Using Revolution for LARGE projects

[Alex Rice]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 03:47  AM, Igor Couto wrote:

> 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.
>

Igor, I am using Revolution in a large project. I am building an expert 
system for facility planning and estimating of construction & 
development projects for the National Park Service. NPS is the largest 
land-owning entity in the U.S. The app is a front end for a expert 
system software (CLIPS) which is called via shell() commands. (maybe 
will write an external for CLIPS eventually)

My project stack file is ~5 MB in size, with one mainstack, 14 
substacks, 3 script library stacks, 1 data stack. So there are LOTS of 
screens and stacks. Some of the stacks have ~ 40 cards.

Some of the interesting features:

-front end for 3rd party software
-the user's responses & preferences are saved in a Revolution data stack
-printing reports & printing screens
-developing on Mac for a Win32 deliverable

Having been using Revolution exclusively for about 7 months, I can tell 
you I am very happy with the decision.

The revolution IDE is very fast and the IDE doesn't seem phased by 
having a 5MB project file. In fact, I continue to be amazed how fast 
Revolution saves such a large project. (approx 1.5 secs) That's 
impressive compared to some other IDEs I've used. The standalone apps 
are acceptable size, and run quick. They look nice on Mac and on 
Windows. There are very responsive email lists and developers at Runrev.

I would NOT recommend REALbasic. I initially was developing this 
project in REALbasic and the result was passable, but it was very 
frustrating for me. Performance and aesthetics were not too good. 
Realbasic doesn't not have anything equivalent to the stacks and cards 
concept in Revolution. If your app has lots of screens, REALbasic will 
get very tedious. The IDE crashed a lot on me in REALbasic. Support was 
not to my satisfaction. Realbasic didn't have a Windows IDE until last 
month when they delivered it, apparently. But it's an extra license, I 
think. With Revolution if you are having a problem that is platform 
specific, you just install the IDE on that platform and debug it in 
real-time. No extra license required.

So for your main questions:

MANAGEABLE: for a large project with many screens and lots of code, 
revolution is superb.

FAST: revolution is fast. Probably as fast as you are going to find in 
a cross-platform tool in my opinion. I don't know of any benchmarks- 
this is just subjective. Don't forget about programmer efficiency too!

DATABASE: I can't answer about doing simultaneous database queries; I'm 
using a data stack instead of a relational database. I'm a big fan of 
PostgreSQL. Valentina is single-user, I think, so scratch that. MySQL 
is fast. Maybe look into the ODBC database support. In the Windows 
world, ODBC is very common and very easy to configure. Less so on Mac.

RELIABLE: I don't think I have encountered any crashes or stability 
problems with the standalone engine (the built application) It just 
works! Revolution is based on Metacard, which has been developed over 
many years. Don't let the 2.0 version number deceive you about it's 
pedigree.

Hope this helps,

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com