altSQLite versus Valentina for Rev

[Trevor DeVore]

On May 16, 2005, at 6:51 AM, Joel Guillod wrote:

> What a good opportunity to explain you some of the reasons why you 
> probably miss so many users. My own experience of Valentina has been a 
> failure because I have never been able to easily operate Valentina 
> with Hypercard/Supercard and more recently with Revolution. Dont reply 
> that I should not be an adequate programer, just search the Rev 
> archives to understand that many  Revolutionados have made attempts to 
> use Valentina with many difficulties and switched to another solution.

To be fair, the majority of the problems with Valentina had to do with 
using externals in the standalone and/or the combination of revdb and 
valentina.  Implementing externals in projects can sometimes be tricky 
and cause problems whether you are using Valentina or any other 
external.

> Also be aware that altSQLite has been released with the following 
> advantages among others:
> - many altPlugins are provided for free and has been proven very 
> usefull and well polished;
> - the altSQLite Demo stack is very well designed and just ready to use 
> sample: you open it, it just works and you can see the sample scripts;
> - affordable price;
> - SQLite is widely recognized by many other developers: see PHP for a 
> single instance, not to say the MacOSX Tiger integration.
> - last but not least: speed development time. I spend many days 
> failing to deal with Valentina user guides where I have been able to 
> create a DB and to write error free scripts with altSQLite in just 
> minutes.
>
> Yet there is a problem with altSqlite under MacOSX 10.3.9 which 
> crashes Revolution in some circonstances but I am confident that 
> Chipp/Altuit will fix that soon. As Revolution developers we know that 
> he is very active and reactive. You have proven the opposite. There 
> was (is? I didn't check recently) no Revolution sample stack for 
> Valentina.

I'm not sure if you are on the Valentina mailing list or not but Ruslan 
is one of the most helpful developers I have ever come across.  True 
there is not example stack and Chipp has created an *excellent* example 
stack but to say that Ruslan has proven the opposite is a not a fair 
statement.

> Also some arguments in favor of Valentina are not so important for 
> most of our applications:
> - speed is most often an issue when users have large databases which 
> is not the case for most of us;
> - price can be an issue: I am not sure that many of us are selling 
> their applications to valuate Valentina more than the free Postgres or 
> MySQL DBMS;

Revolution has many different types of users so it is hard to group 
"us" together.  My company sees speed as a very important consideration 
when choosing a database and $299 is a small fee to pay for for adding 
a tool to our toolbox that meats our needs.

> - Those DBMS are supported by many developers and we dont know what 
> would happen to Valentina I you disappear tomorrow. SQLite source code 
> is available and free. What a warranty for our data;

Valentina supports SQL.  If it were to disappear tomorrow you could 
migrate your database to another vendor without much hassle.  In fact, 
right now I develop databases using MySQL and then deploy to the client 
using Valentina.  All of the database creation is coded so it is a 
one-click process.

> - multiusers capability require another process to execute Valentina 
> and those DBMS. I dont see any advantages of one over the others if 
> you'd like to release an easy installation to users.
> My last comment is that competition is good! As developers we really 
> thank Altuit to have written the SQLite plugin because this finally 
> forces Paradigma Software Inc to seriously watch for the Revolution 
> developers to give them the consideration and support they actually 
> missed until today. BUT be aware that the time is very short not to 
> loose the market today! Dont do war, build tools which prooves you 
> make the developers' life easier!

Competition is good.  It is great that Altuit has provided a SQLite 
external for us because it offers more choices.  Sometimes SQLite will 
be a great solution.  Sometimes a project requires features not 
available in SQLite.  I'm glad to have both options available to me.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com