revJournal reQuest for Content

[Alan Golub]

First, thanks to all on this list who have visited, contributed to, and 
otherwise supported, revJournal.com. We're happy to host as many of you 
as will come.

As many of you know, we've added two new editors to our staff (Sarah 
and Björnke --thanks so much for your awesome help!) in an effort to 
keep the content as fresh and as frequent as possible. Guests like Dan 
Shafer and Richard Gaskin have also made appearances, and the feedback 
from these cameos suggest that our readers find them invaluable, and 
want to see more of the same.

Thus, I'd like to elicit some more help/participation from you revGurus 
out there. I have a few article ideas I'll throw out to you in a 
minute, but I once again invite any and all of you to consider writing 
an article about: (a) something you have particular expertise in; (b) a 
Revolution tool or utility you use regularly; (c) relatively 
undocumented features of Revolution; (d) success stories of how 
Revolution has changed your business/life, etc.; or (e) programming in 
general.

Here are some suggestions for articles I'd love to see:

1. A database primer. One of the coolest things about the stack/card 
design is that you get a sort of simple database capability for free. 
But a true relational database is much more powerful, and I'd love to 
see an article about how Revolution can, and in some cases, should, be 
used as a front-end for a separate RDMS. What is a database? When/why 
would you use one? How to you connect to one from Rev? What are the 
strengths/weaknesses of the various RDMSs that work with Rev? Ideally, 
an extended series of articles on this topic would be extremely 
interesting and helpful.

2. OOP. A recent thread on the lists discussed adding true OOP 
capabilities to Rev. Very interesting. But I'd love more! What is OOP? 
What are its advantages? How does Rev's object-based paradigm compare? 
What are we missing? What do we stand to gain/lose?

3. CGI. Lots of questions on this, but this is sophisticated stuff for 
the inexperienced. What is it, why would you use it, how does 
Revolution support it?

4. XML. Basically the same comments made above about CGI.

5. Algorithms and Data Structures -- Although I plan on covering this 
on an as-needed basis in my revSchool lessons, wouldn't it be neat to 
have a periodic column covering how to implement a relatively standard 
data structure in Transcript?

Anyway, these are some non-exclusive suggestions -- I'm open to 
anything you'd like to write about, the only criteria being that it is 
somehow relevant to the Revolution developer community.

If you think you can contribute, or have additional ideas for topics 
you'd like to see covered, please contact me off-list at publisher 
@revjournal.com. As you can tell from the site content, our publishing 
schedule is on an as-able basis -- there's no real pressure or deadline 
other than wanting to get good stuff up for everyone as soon as 
reasonably possible. In other words, please consider writing even if 
you think you'll need a lengthy period of time to get a draft in to me.

Thanks as always for you encouragement and support.

Keep on revvin'!

Alan S. Golub
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3200 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/attachments/20030903/54a911f1/attachment.bin>