Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

[Stephen Barncard]

Wrong assumptions. Rev works completely in RAM after loading. Save to 
disk is only done under command or script control.
What you're seeing as disk activity is probably virtual memory in 
your OS. Rev doesn't touch that.

Most of us have given up the card data metaphor for serious projects. 
Forget the speed issue - having business code and data mixed together 
is just bad practice.

What you might consider 'lacking' is a trade-off most of us are happy 
to accept considering all the other advantages. I'm sure the makers 
of Rev have a good technical reason.  And I frankly don't care about 
the card metaphor - to me it's just to accommodate legacy hypercard 
stacks for the transition and simple applications and documentation. 
There are so many ways to store data. Even in my Hypercard days I 
started storing data in resource forks of stacks.    The great 
Rinaldi had an XCMD set that could save and get text in TEXT 
resources that could be edited in ResCopy or ResEdit. They were just 
like todays custom properties in Rev.

I was looking for ways to improve data use in Hypercard back in the 
90's as one of the first users of the SQL database 'Butler'. It was 
the first SQL server built to run on a mac.  Unfortuately the server 
was buggy and the XCMDs worse, it was crashing too much to even 
develop more than a few lines of SQL.

There's a lot more 'stuff' on a Rev card than a Hypercard 'card', so 
I guess moving and searching among the cards causes some messaging to 
occur, and some amount of housekeeping is done on each page change. A 
lot of this stuff goes away with  lock screen etc.

But boy, if you're used to Hypercard speed and you hook up a real 
database to Rev... it will blow your socks off with speed and has so 
many more features you can apply to your data.. like working on 
entire columns at once, aggregate functions, etc.


>supercomputers sitting on our desks or in our laps. Revolution
>shouldn't take a performance hit until you're dealing with millions of
>cards. Maybe it's doing something stupid in all of that searching, like
>thousands of saves to disk when it should be suspending them until the
>search operation is over.

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stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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