java?
Richard Gaskin
ambassador at fourthworld.com
Sat Sep 17 14:07:23 EDT 2005
Eric Engle wrote:
> My current development strategy is to use hypercard for classic and then port
> to metacard for windows and os x. It seems a workable strategy.
Workable in the sense that you can drive a nail with a screwdriver if
you're sufficiently determined; just not optimal. :)
Rev's language and object model go far beyond HC's. Limiting yourself
to HyperCard and working in that foreign and, unfortunately at this
point, obsolete file format just adds an extra step and offers little
benefit for the trouble.
Moreoer, it locks you into Classic at a time when Apple's doing
everything they can do put that OS to rest, so it'll only become
increasingly difficult to maintain such a workflow. For example, Apple
has already said that there will be no Classic support in their new
Mactel machines, and those are only nine months away.
What would be the difficulty in authoring Rev stacks natively in Rev?
If the HC UI is attractive have you considered Alain Farmer's FreeGUI?
Remember that unlike HC, with Transcript the IDE UI is 100% cutomizable.
...
> But I don't think there is a good hypercard/revolution solution for
> online distribution (i.e. you cannot yet run a stack from within a
> browser).
Just for clarification, the Web and the Internet are not synonymous, and
the HTTP is not limited to browsers per se.
So while it's not possible to "run a stack from within a browser" you
can craft a nearly infinite variety of other UIs for "online distribution".
If you need to run your app specifically inside of a browser window,
Java or Flash are great solutions.
But if the goal is to deliver applications over the Internet using
standard protocols (HTTP, FTP), that's already built into Rev. And
thanks to Dave Cragg's work on libURL, most of what you'd need to do are
one-liners.
With Rev you also have a POST command to send info to a CGI, and if you
can run Rev on the server you can have Transcript driving both the
client and server sides.
And you also have raw socket support to you can make just about anything
else your heart desires, from chat clients to even custom web servers
(Scott Raney made a simple web server some years ago, and Andre's
expanded that into quite a sweet suite).
While the promised simplicity of having Java run automatically in a
browser seems attractive, in practice it doesn't seem simple to achieve.
Maybe it's a Mozilla/Firefox thang, but I run across a good many Java
applets that just don't run well with Apple's JVM.
And when they do, the nature of browser-delivered media means I have to
download the entire UI and code every time I access it.
In contrast, a custom web app built with Rev can maintain its own
persistent cache completely under your control, so it operates more like
the AOL client in which UI elements are downloaded only once and reused
locallty, so the experience just gets snappier and snappier with each
session.
And then there are the UI considerations, described at:
<http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/netapps.html>
So in short, if you truly need to deply within the confines of a browser
window, with some effort you may find Java a great solution.
But if the goal is Internet deployment, you may find you can do
everything you need, and perhaps a bit more, right in Transcript.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
___________________________________________________________
Ambassador at FourthWorld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
More information about the use-livecode
mailing list