Rev vs. AJAX... Ajax vs TAOO [LONG]

[Dan Shafer]

Xavier.....

I know you're frustrated. I have been excited about TAOO in Rev ever  
since you first mentioned it, as you know. I have downloaded all the  
pieces you've sent me. I've looked at them. I've cut them open and  
probed their internals. I've read their code where I could. I've  
edited docs where I could. You and I have exchanged dozens of emails  
about it.

And I still don't completely get it.

Alex Tweedly said much the same thing. Your response was to point us  
to the first line on your site as the "elevator pitch" for TAOO. Do  
you mean this line?

"Modular Object Network Semantical Infeered Ergonomic User-friendly  
Rapid Xtreme Development Or Trans-Contextual Organization Management.  
In other words:

The Art Of Objects!"

If so, I can tell you that communicates nothing meaningful, at least  
to me. It's a loosely coupled set of buzzwords.

COnsiderably farther down on your site -- in a location many people  
probably never get to because they don't understand that top-level  
message -- you have this: "The Art Of Objects is an environment to  
navigate, find and edit information in the most flexible and reusable  
way and for any computer program or object oriented application on  
any platform." SO it doesn't sound like an OO framework for app  
development. Rather, it sounds like an information-navigation utility  
that would be quite suitable if one were building apps whose primary  
raison d'etre were the navigation of large, complex, intertwingled  
information spaces. And that's the impression I now have of TAOO. But  
that's not what I thought you were talking about originally. And so  
things are very confusing even for someone, like me, who has invested  
dozens of hours in trying hard to grasp what you are doing.

I've asked you what kinds of apps TAOO is NOW suited to develop. What  
I THINK I hear in response is that it's good at managing information  
structures. So if I have an app that consists primarily of  
information structures, TAOO might be a great tool. I don't have many  
such applications. My apps are interactive experiences for the user,  
with little data storage associated with them. At least the ones I'm  
making these days. My sense, then, is that TAOO is (at least yet) not  
a general-purpose object-oriented framework for the construction of  
any kind of application I want to build. ANd if it is, how to get  
started and what to do as I progress is just not clear.

So in answer to your wondering why "some lame projects get praise  
while hard-work projects get none," it's about the buzz, about the  
marketing, about the promotion. And that in turn requires two things:  
Passion (which you clearly have) and really clear focus on what the  
project is and what problem(s) it's intended to solve (which I think  
you still struggle with, perhgaps, as Alex suggested, because it's  
just so large and complex). But it's not even all that easy to get to  
the basic stuff about TAOO on your site, Xavier.

If TAOO were a general-purpose object framework with a clearly  
factored library of built-in objects with which one could begin to  
construct any Rev application -- or even a major subset of Rev apps  
-- and if it had a LOT of examples built that could be easily  
disassembled to see how the TAOO componentry made them possible or  
easier to create, I think it could in fact catch on.

WHere, for example, do your tool palettes fit in to TAOO? Were they  
built using TAOO? They don't look like information space navigators.  
IF they were built in TAOO, what specific aspects of TAOO made them  
faster or easier to build than if I'd done them in pure Rev? Where's  
the class library underneath them? If you want them to be examples of  
the power of TAOO, you have to expose that power in a way that those  
of us who are Rev coders with an object orientation can understand.  
So far, you haven't been able to do that.

There is a vague sense of excitement about what you offer here. Your  
passion is obvious. That you've developed this architecture across  
many languages over the years is impressive. But at the end of the  
day, a busy programmer cannot easily figure out what this beast is  
and how it would help him or her develop powerful applications with  
greater facility.

On Oct 14, 2005, at 4:55 AM, xbury.cs at clearstream.com wrote:


> What i really dont get is why some lame
> projects get praise while hard-work projects get none...
>



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
 From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html