Best place for common script

[Richard Gaskin]

Robert J. Earp wrote:

> Over the years I've scripted a whole mess of sub-routines/ functions/tools
> etc. , most recently in ToolBook, where I've used their System Books feature.
> 
> For those of you that have never used ToolBook, they use the term Book the
> same as Rev uses Stack, and System Books are just regular ToolBook files
> (Books) with a .sbk extension, but with the ability to be dynamically
> linked with a project Book.  This means that they are automatically in the
> message path hierarchy, above the project book (the main stack), and below
> the engine (ToolBook interpreter itself).
> 
> The great thing about this is that you can just fire off a message to a
> handler/function located in a .sbk and it gets trapped, acted upon and
> replied to as appropriate.
> 
> You also have the added feature of being able to have more than System Book
> with one for, say, a CBT navigation schema, and one with some development
> tools.  On the fly you can link or unlink these books so its easy to
> deliver a project with the features of one System Book and automatically
> the other.
> 
> My question is quite basic, but one that I suspect will draw a plethora of
> different opinions.  Given the concept above and, to my knowledge Rev does
> not support such a concept, where is the best place to put "System Book"
> functionality ?  Main stack, sub stack?  At what level ?  Can you link
> stacks so that they are at a specific level of the message hierarchy ?

I've used ToolBook to build a system of AICC-compliant "books" (in TB
parlance) which made heavy use of system books exactly as you describe (one
for interfacing with a courseware server, one for multimedia sequencing,
another for general utilities).

With Rev you have two very options very similar to TB's system books:
libraries and backscripts.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to try to reduce the number of ten-page
posts I make to this list <g>, but this question comes up often and deserves
a thorough treatment so I compromised and posted a new article to my site on
this:

<http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/revolution_message_path.html>

For those of you who attended the plugins session at the Rev seminar this
will serve as refresher notes for some of my introductory material (sockets
tutorial forthcoming).

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
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 Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com