Looking for suggestions/advice

[Dan Shafer]

Well, I was sort of designing on the back of a napkin there, but my  
idea was that the first entry in each line is a command, the second  
line is the name of the function that command calls, everything else  
on the line is a parameter to that function/method call.

On Aug 11, 2005, at 4:04 PM, Rodney Somerstein wrote:

> Can you tell me a little more about the table driven approach you  
> were mentioning? Are doplay and playTheGame two different commands,  
> both of which take the same arguments? Or is doplay the user  
> command and playTheGame is the script that I would call after  
> determining which command was issued? I'm guessing the latter is  
> what you were explaining to me.
>

>
> RBScript sounds interesting, but I have been led to believe that  
> REALBasic doesn't work as well for non-Mac programs. Have they  
> gotten to the point of producing great code running on Mac and  
> Windows without having to jump through a lot of hoops? For that  
> matter, has Rev really gotten to that point? What about Linux?
>
Well, there are a couple of answers here. RB appears to have made  
significant strides in the Windows and Linux departments with RB2005.  
Windows support is pretty native and now allows debugging on Windows,  
a big improvement over the older model. I haven't read much about the  
quality of Windows support and apps but what I have read has been  
quite positive. A fairly large number of VB refugees is making its  
way to RB if that means anything.

As for Linux, RB is in beta on Linux and apparently plans to give it  
away on that platform. Reports I've read have been very favorable.  
OTOH, it is still beta. Rev, by comparison, has been running on Linux  
for quite a while and its implementation is apparently pretty good.  
I've run three compiled Rev apps on Linux (Debian via Linspire) and  
they ran just right. The IDE isn't updated for Linux yet and the  
engine is a revision behind as I recall. So the Linux reviews are,  
I'd say, mixed on both Rev and RB.

> What do you think of the approach that I mentioned in another  
> message of making the scripting language pretty much be composed of  
> just methods/scripts in whatever language I choose?

As you point out, this approach has some distinct advantages. I  
certainly wouldn't allow it to rule out Rev; Kevin is open to  
discussing reducing or removing the limitation on scripts at runtime  
on a case by case basis and yours sounds at least potentially  
sufficiently restrictive that it might pass their test.

> Unfortunately neither Python or Ruby seem to offer any easy way to  
> write standalone applications with a GUI and make the application  
> easily deployable for non-developers.

Yeah, that's the rub with them alright. If Python had that, I  
probably wouldn't even have looked at Rev. So on one level at least I  
guess I'm glad Python is deficient in that way. :-)

> I suspect I would end up needing to switch to embedding Python or  
> Ruby in Java to allow for this. Since both languages already offer  
> Java implementations, this would be easy. I'm not sure whether Ruby  
> is really viable, but I've heard it mentioned a lot so I have just  
> started looking.

Yech. Hope you don't have to do that. Java (as I suspect you know) is  
so ugly and has such immense overhead. See my earlier note on Ruby. I  
don't know your programming background but Ruby was certainly not  
elegant and beautiful to these old Revolutionary eyes.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolution Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
 From http://www.revolutionpros.com, Click "My Stuff"