Why choose Revolution

[Dan Shafer]

Welcome to the conversation. I'm sure you'll be inundated with  
responses. I'll try to keep mine brief, but I'm not always very good  
at that. I write books for a living and sometimes my emails are book- 
like.

On Jul 23, 2005, at 10:05 AM, J. Valle 1234web.net wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been playing for a couple of days with Revolution and Realbasic,
> researching trought the lists, looking for the right tool to develop
> cross platform commercial applications, but the main target platform
> would be Windows and both tools looks specially focused on Mac OS.
>
First, understand my comments about RealBASIC apply to Version 5.5. I  
have not looked at RB2005. I spent a fair amount of time looking at  
RB vs. Rev before I made the commitment to Rev about two years ago now.

That said, I believe you'll find creating Windows apps on OS X much  
easier and more direct with Rev than with RB. Rev's IDE runs on  
Windows so you can, with the right license, debug, test and fix your  
apps directly on Windows. Last time I looked, RB lets you *deploy* an  
app on Windows but if it breaks, you have to go back to the Mac to  
fix it and then re-deploy it. My guess is that would become tiresome  
and inefficient in a real hurry.

> Seems that Revolution has a loyal base of users but is less popular  
> than
> Realbasic, also a lot more expensive, the way documentation is  
> organized
> is not exactly intuitive and the main con is their exotic language and
> programming paradigma.
>
You are correct that RB has a larger installed base. It's been around  
a lot longer and has attracted quite a few Visual Basic refugees to  
swell its ranks.

"Expensive" is in the eyes of the evaluator. I think that the total  
cost of ownership (TCO) of a development tool is hard to forecast.  
But my feeling is that RB would turn out in the long run to be more  
expensive than Rev because of the xplat issues I mentioned above. The  
longer it takes to develop and deploy an application, the more costly  
the tool, regardless of initial price point.

The language in Rev may seem exotic to you (I take it you probably  
come from a more conventional language background, perhaps even  
Basic. By those standards, Transcript is different, perhaps even  
exotic. But it's a VHLL (Very High Level Language) while Basic is an  
HLL. This translates into two observations. First, you can often do  
in one line of Transcript what would take several (perhaps many)  
lines of Basic. Second, there's a lot more built into the language  
than in RB. So very often you find that a single line/component in  
Rev does what would take a lot of work in RB. When I used RB, I found  
that I had to work out very detailed descriptions of code at a  
relatively low level to write methods. In Transcript, I more often  
than not just start coding and what seems like it should work just  
does. Big plus.

That said, it's fair to say, too, that RB has true object orientation  
in its language. If you're an object thinker like I am, that's a very  
big attraction. One thing you can do in RB that you cannot do in Rev  
is to create new classes or types of UI components and other objects.  
Depending on your experience and approach and on your application's  
needs, that may or may not be important.


> Then the questions are:
> - Why should choose Revolution instead Realbasic? comments from people
> using both tools would be greatly appreciated
Above
> - Is this a mature tool to develop cross platform applications?
The language and the engine are very mature, in fact I think they're  
more mature than RB. The Revolution IDE still has quirks and bugs and  
workarounds and is very much a relatively stable work in progress. I  
have heard but cannot confirm from personal experience that RB 2005  
-- which has been completely rewritten in itself -- has a lot of bugs  
and issues in the IDE as well. Prior to that release, my assessment  
would have been that the IDE in RB was somewhat more stable  
principally from having so many more people beating on it.

> - I suppose that maturity is not a problem for Mac, but what about
> Windows and Linux?

See earlier comments re windows. Linux is farther along on Rev than  
on RB by quite a but but frankly neither tool does all that good a  
job there from what my limited testing and listening to this list  
reveals.

> - What are the differences between Studio and Enterprise version? a
> comparison table on your site would help to decide.
>
I'll let someone from RunRev answer.

> Thanks,
> Jose
> -- 
> J. Valle 1234web.net <jvalle at 1234web.net>
> www.1234web.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your  
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>
>