Dreamcard Roadster in the future???

Sun Jun 5 11:29:32 EDT 2005

Hi Folks,

I never used SuperCard but to think in embedding a runtime engine 
inside a browser plugin is not a good idea in my opnion. People always 
talk, let us get Revolution on the web!!!! and stuff like that, I think 
Revolution is more than the web. See, if RunRev creates a plugin for 
Rev to open inside a browser window, clients still will need to install 
the plugin, so  what is the difference between using Dreamcard Player 
and a browser plugin? Both will need to be downloaded but the Dreamcard 
player is much more than a browser. I can't see a single advantage 
using the browser plugin approach. There's no way for RunRev to create 
a magical way that loading http://myserver/myVoodooStack.rev will 
sundenlly pop ups an application, also, that would be too risky. In 
win32 land they could create strange auto installable ActiveX wrappers, 
but that would break the whole cross platform thing we come to trust 
and love.

Also about exporting to flash, I think we're missing the thing, I don't 
think flash can do all things Rev can do, for example, can flash 
plugins listen on a socket? I trully don't know, also, is flash able to 
build "Real" guis with drag and drop and clipboard support, or we will 
run on the land of emulated graphics (cute, but, emulated). I think 
exporting to java bytecodes would be better, almost half the job is 
done, java can access all we need. Altought I like the Dreamcard player 
better than any browser.

Another option if you trully want to go web-esque in your Rev doings is 
to go CGI. CGIs are easy to do and now will all the xml wonders running 
around the web one can pull very clever tricks.

For the education market, just think like this, Using a browser will 
restrict your app in the browser pluging window and the popups it 
spawns, if the kids in America are like the kids here in Brazil, great 
chance that in the first minute the teacher turns its back, they will 
all open another flap in their browsers and start chatting, playing 
games, and just browse their fav sites, oh, and email all their 
buddies, and there's nothing you'll be able to do. Unless you cut their 
internet access and lock them inside a lan. Which when I was young in 
the school was motive enough for subversion and for us to hide DOOM 
copies in the machines and play without sound while the teachers tried 
to teach us, it enabled situations like when the principal was 
strolling thru the classes:

	Principal: look all the teens are so concentrated at their screens, 
computers do favor education.
	Teacher: I am so proud of those teens.
	Teen #1: Quick Marcelo there are rocket launchers in bay #2!!!!  
(shouting)
	Principal: ...
	Teacher looks angry
	Teen #1: Hey, I finished my work okay!
	Teacher: Yeah, I belive you're all finished....

Now let us talk about the beautifull realms of Dreamcard Player in 
education/subversion environment. First, Dreamcard Player is sandboxed, 
so no kid can destroy the computer, install Virii or malware just by 
using the thing (... in that school class, we were 5 coders and our 
main activity was to code virii to kill the students lab so that we 
could skip classes. When the teachers figured it out, they did the most 
smart thing I ever saw, they created a 'tuition program' and gave us 
benefit to keep the school clean of virii and also made us code usefull 
apps for the school like public voting system for the students, we were 
13 or 14 can't remember right now, but we used turbo pascal). Let us 
get back to Dreamcard Player, the player can load stacks and with some 
clever coding one can remote control the students players much like the 
Apple eMate/Classroom dock. The player is a rich client with a rich gui 
and library, there's more freedom for creating teaching tools with 
Dreamcard Player then with Browsers and HTML interfaces. The students 
will have no way of killing time using the player, no email, no cool 
sites to browse, one school should license altBrowser and create a 
students browser that they could flip on or off as the students finish 
their tasks, this way they could manage their time.

There are so many benefits using the Dreamcard Player for education 
that just by writting this email I keep finding more and this runs the 
risk of becoming an eternal thread. I think the ideal setup for an 
education lab would be:

	Student computers running dreamcard player with altBrowser.
	Teacher computer running Rev with altSQLite (your databases easy to 
backup)

	The teachers computer should have a Boss/Guide stack that would allow 
him to load and unload stacks on the students computer. The students 
besides all the educational stacks could have a little altBrowser based 
browser, a little eMail app and a Chat app (RevChat anyone?). This 
setup is safe and don't restrict your creative options as a 
teacher/RevCoder, all the other two options browser plugin/flash would 
not enable you to travel the far realms of true revolution engine! :-P

man, this is a big email...

andre

On Jun 5, 2005, at 11:20 AM, Ken Ray wrote:

>
>> http://www.littlefishsw.co.uk/card/roadster.html
>>
>> I have been surfing supercard websites... my impression:
>>
>> Plenty of very clever changes have been introduced in 
>> Dreamcard/revolution,
>> compared to supercard, the IDE environment is a lot more practical in
>> revolution (though I agree with others on this list that it could 
>> still be
>> improved), the products that I have seen developed with revolution 
>> look more
>> professional than the ones developed with supercard.
>>
>> I prefer Dreamcard/Revolution, by far... but the education market may 
>> polarize
>> on the availability of this Roadster plugin which let them play their 
>> stacks
>> over the net. Anybody is trying to address this?
>
> Hey Marielle!
>
> Well, the first thing you need to know is the Roadster only worked with
> SuperCard 3.x under OS 9; they are currently at 4.5 under OS X and 
> AFAIK
> have no plans to upgrade the plugin.
>
> Secondly, the Roadster plugin was mediocre at best - lots of stuff 
> didn't
> work, or didn't work properly, and although you could develop something
> simple to play in the browser, it was hard to do something 
> sophisticated for
> the web.
>
> I think it may actually be better if RunRev wants to consider running
> content in a plugin that it consider outputing stacks to Flash and 
> running
> them with *that* plugin (since it is so ubiquitous) rather than 
> creating
> their own plugin.
>
> But that's just my 2 cents,
>
> Ken Ray
> Sons of Thunder Software
> Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
> Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>
>
-- 
Andre Alves Garzia ð 2004 ð BRAZIL
http://studio.soapdog.org