Making the move...

[Josh Mellicker]

On Mar 10, 2006, at 7:45 AM, Mvreade wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been playing with Revolution for a few days and am VERY  
> impressed with its capabilities and ease of use.
>
> I do however, have a few questions and reservations, which  
> hopefully you guys can answer.
>
> I found it a bit buggy (using a iBook G4, 1G of memory, on OSX  
> 10.4).  The property inspector went blank a few times, the  
> application crashed once, the sample database query in the example  
> solutions was updating records, demo videos weren't displaying, to  
> mention a few.

After 10 years of developing applications in Director and Filemaker,  
5 years of Flash & LiveStage Pro, a couple years of PHP/MySQL and  
doing some thorough exploration and testing with RealBasic and Ruby  
on Rails I plan to (try to) create most every project in Revolution  
from here on out.

Bottom line: The ability to switch tools and instantly run the app  
without any 'compiling' eliminates RealBasic, Java, C++ and many  
other options for me. The superior Quicktime performance, card  
paradigm and database implementation beats Director. The ease of  
coding with Constellation beats Flash Studio. The ease of integrating  
MySQL beats FileMaker. The interface consistency, speed and  
reliability beats Ruby on Rails.

I have seen various descriptions of noobs like me as they travel  
those first few wobbly steps- the "aha" factor, etc.

I think of as a kind of love/dismay relationship... Revolution in  
many ways is so powerful and fast to produce results it lives up to  
any hype you've heard. On the other hand the dev environment is buggy  
(for me anyway), some commands just don't work or work in clearly  
different ways than intended, sometimes I have to force quit (thanks  
for Constellation autosave) but the final standalone product is rock- 
solid- 3,000+ users of one app developed by Fourth World for us with  
zero problems or problems- that's right folks, ZERO! Director  
projects have always at best demonstrated scattered incompatibilities  
with certain OS/QT combos and sometimes severe performance problems.

There is a 3rd party script editor called Constellation without  
which, in my opinion, Revolution is barely usable in a professional  
setting.

For a small user base, there is excellent support available on this  
email list and on the websites of the major developers.

I am currently (attempting to) develop a system utilizing a remote  
MySQL multiuser database (12 tables currently, will probably end up  
at 20) and I'm amazed at well it's going whenever I have time to  
devote to it. It's fast, reliable, solid and once you figure out what  
works, it works every time.

I can now do in 10-15 minutes what it takes a Rails expert an hour or  
more to do- and that's with a "framework" app!

I hope soon Rev gets Guy Kawasaki for Marketing VP and sells millions  
of copies and is able to subsidize the hero pioneers efforts who  
without which Rev would die a quick death, the Kens, Richards,  
Jerrys, Jans, and so on, and fix all the bugs and make the wish list  
come true... but until then, I will use it anyway!


>
> So the quesiton is, how good of an environment to work on is it?
>
> And how stable are the final applications?
>
> For users who have used Rev for databases, I was wondering what  
> it's like to develop a system with, say, 20 tables and lots or  
> relationships and methods?
>
> Where would one store all the methods?

I am currently storing functions, scripts and even data in fields on  
a "data" card, it's great "seeing" your variables live!

>
> For relationships, would one just keep a VERYlong list of Database  
> Queries?
>
> Finally, does any one know if Runtime Revolution Ltd has any plans  
> to have a connection to an open source, embeddable database, such  
> as SQLite?
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Michael Reade
>
>
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