who's out there?

[Dan Shafer]

Jon....

I've created several commercial products for clients using  
Revolution, going back to 1.1, and they all had to run on both Mac  
and Windows. I am a Mac guy, so I did all the development work on  
Macintosh. While you can run into some fairly well-documented issues  
as you move across platforms, a huge percentage of what you write  
once will run anywhere. I've spent a good part of my career looking  
at programming languages and development environments, both for my  
own use and in writing books and doing technology assessment. I can  
honestly say that Revolution is, hands down, the most seamless cross- 
platform software development tool available.

Over the next four months I will release four of my *own* commercial  
products on Mac and Windows, and all of them will be done in  
Revolution. I will be able to deliver them over the Web, auto-update  
them transparently, offer professional installation capabilities, and  
do all the other things you'd expect from a professional piece of  
software. All at a fraction of the time investment of any other tool  
I know about.

You say the Revolution IDE "is just too buggy." I've read all of the  
messages on this list - including many from you in recent days - and  
I can't honestly say I've seen you report or describe a single bug.  
Quirks, yes; all development environments have those. Stuff that's  
confusing, to be sure. Need for improvement, absolutely. But to  
characterize it as "buggy" given what I have read from you here is  
simply going too far. I know how frustrating it can be trying to  
master this environment (that's why I wrote a book and some sample  
eChapters about it) but I can't honestly say that I've encountered  
one thing I needed to do to create a professional looking, usable  
software application and couldn't do in Revolution. It doesn't do  
everything and it's not suited to all problems, but for upwards of  
95% of all software being written today above the system level, I  
challenge you to find a better solution.


On Jun 05 2005, at 18:05, Jon wrote:


> I'm curious.  How many of you use Rev to make a living, and how  
> many of you just play with it.  I'm at the point where I can't  
> believe anyone could use it to do serious development.  It is just  
> too buggy, syntax idiosyncrasies and sloth aside.
>
> And how many of you successfully deploy cross-platform  
> applications?  That is my holy grail, but I'm so far away from that  
> I can't even imagine it.
>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Co-Chair
RevConWest '05
June 17-18, 2005, Monterey, California
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest