Rev and open source (was "What Rev Needs")

[Richard Gaskin]

Devin Asay wrote:
> 
> On Dec 8, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for an  
>> engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?
> 
> A recent experience I had illustrates, I think, what David means.  
> Earlier this year I was writing a room scheduling application in Rev.  
> One of the features was that people who requested to schedule the  room 
> had to be officially associated with the university. The obvious  answer 
> was our enterprise LDAP server (open source technology). Rev  can't 
> query LDAP directly, but BSD Unix (open source) has a utility  called 
> ldapsearch. PHP (open source) can also do LDAP searches. I  opted for 
> the latter, because that made my project easier to take  cross platform. 
> So I found an open source PHP script that would do  the search and 
> return the results as HTML (an open source protocol).  I deployed the 
> script on our apache web server (open source) and used  a Rev 'get URL 
> <url>' command to grab the results, which I easily  parsed in Transcript 
> to get exactly what I needed. When my app  verifies, from LDAP, that the 
> requester is officially permitted to  schedule, it records the scheduled 
> event in a mysql database (open  source).
> 
> I have other Rev apps that have similarly pulled together disparate  
> technologies quickly and easily into a Rev front end. In my opinion  
> this is an area in which Rev excels--as a rapid development platform  
> for writing front ends to other technologies. In effect, Rev  increases 
> the power and reach of the latter, showing itself to be an  
> easy-to-learn "glue" for open source stuff that's often opaque to non- 
> propeller-heads.

That's a wonderful example, but if I read it correctly it seems you were 
able to do what you needed on your own, without RunRev lifting a finger.

For myself, that's the sort of solution I prefer as well:  the fewer the 
cooks the sweeter the broth. I don't run their company and they don't 
run mine, and we both like it like that.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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