While this may be heresy

[Ken Ray]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:34:12 +0000, Simon HARPER wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> While I understand this may be heresy, how does Revolution stack up 
> to RealBasic, especially when it comes to thinks like richness of the 
> interface (such as hierarchical Listboxs)?

It's not heresy, it's a reasonable question. :-) 

However it's a question that could take a long time to answer, 
depending on how specific you want a comparison. They both have their 
strengths and weaknesses, and at one time a member of this list (Geoff 
Canyon) wrote up a comparison between the two, but this was several 
versions ago for both products, so only a portion of that treatise  is 
relevant anymore.

However, my opinion is that in relation to the "richness of the 
interface", it's a tie. RealBasic has more built in interface objects 
than Rev, but Rev has more control over its interface objects than 
RealBasic. So in my opinion for this specific issue, it's a toss-up. Of 
course you can create your own custom objects in both programs to fill 
any gaps.

But the power of Revolution isn't centered in the expansiveness of its 
built-in controls; it's in the language itself. If you are interested, 
I wrote an unpublished paper that walked through the RealBasic tutorial 
document, examined it, and compared it with how you'd do things in 
Revolution. As an overview, in about 80% of the code comparisons, 
Revolution took less lines of code to accomplish the same task than did 
RealBasic. If you're interested in having a look, contact me offlist.

There is (obviously) a lot more to compare the two products, but 
hopefully this will help get you started...


Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/