Revolution Web Browser Plugin

[Andre Garzia]

Luis and friends,

well, this topic has been touched before. Many times. :-)

I'll touch simple things first, the stacks and cards metaphor of  
Revolution can be presented in a XML format, but anyway, anything can  
be represented in XML format. XML cannot contain binary data, this is  
a violation of the spec. You binary data must be encoded with base64  
or some other encoding. Not all browsers support SVG also.

My systems as seen in http://www.andregarzia.com are not ready, and  
they are targeted at developing web applications with a HTML  
interface and web services using REST and XML-RPC.

As for the eternal struggle of those in favor of a web plugin, let us  
think one thing first. Web plugins are not magical, people still have  
to download and install the plugin, this is not automatical. The  
plugin would at least weight as much as the engine, so it is actually  
the same thing as downloading a Revolution stack player. Plugins must  
be built not only for each browser because each uses a different  
interface but also for each platform. I don't think a browser plugin  
is a wise idea, there's not enough resources to mantain it. I think  
there are only two ways to go:

	1) Use thin clients. Many enterprizes are moving away from the  
browser. The browser is dumb and you spend a lot more time dealing  
with its shortcomings than coding your own solution. I advise people  
to read the "beyond the browser" article by Richard Gaskin.
	2) In case you really need the browser, use XHTML + Ajax techniques.  
This needs not a plugin, you can just code it server side with Rev  
and client side with Javascript.

A thing that could be done is to make the engine output java  
bytecode, this would allow a stack to be run inside JVM which would  
bring it to the browser arena, but again, this would involve  
rewritting the whole engine and debugging the new engine and also the  
JVM, again, there's no resource for that I think, it's RunRev not  
Microsoft.

Andre




On Nov 1, 2006, at 9:14 AM, Luis wrote:

> Well, from a while ago the XML nature of the Cards was bandied about.
> I would have through these could be parsed and the appropriate 'web  
> equivalent' controls then written to an HTML file, precluding the  
> need for a plugin.
> A running Rev instance could do this to itself, saving off the  
> contents of the Card view. Stuff like buttons should be ok as long  
> as they are 'web safe' images, then there's SVG too.
>
> Interaction would need cgi processing for the data to be sent back  
> to the running app, or dealing with it within a Rev Web Server:  
> http://www.andregarzia.com/revwiki/page/RevOnRockets
>
> The only problem is the embedded binary data: Are there docs that  
> detail its structure?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Luis.
>
>
>
> Viktoras Didziulis wrote:
>> Revolution applets, with possibility to communicate with web page via
>> javascript or revscript on a web page would be a very handy  
>> solution to
>> deliver java-like applets without all the complexity and overheads  
>> of java
>> language. I vote for this.  Best Viktoras
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