The sky is falling... [was Re: Is Rev too "Mac focused"?]

[Richard Gaskin]

Dan Shafer wrote:
> Java's xplat support  is, from all accounts and limited personal 
> experience, a nightmare and a joke.

Not anymore.

Sure, when Marimba release Bongo we all had a good chuckle, but that was 
many years ago.

A more modern example is ThinkFree Office:
<http://www.thinkfree.com/products/pd_office20.jsp>

Fully written in Java, it's appearances and performance seem roughly on 
par with Rev for many key tasks.

I managed to purge my hard drive of all Microsoft apps, but since so 
many people mistake Excel and Word for open standards that it's 
essential to be able to read those formats. ThinkFree Office does a fair 
job of reading and writing most Excel and Word files (those are 
proprietary formats, so there are limitations), and it does so fairly 
efficiently and provides acceptable interfaces for editing them.

Oddly enough, they have a feature similar to RevOnline called 
"CyberDrive", which provides space on their servers for storing and 
trading documents.

Of course I believe they'd cut their development costs in half if they 
switched to Rev, but as an example of what modern Java frameworks can 
deliver it's a pretty good one.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev