Another Revolution?

[Mark Wieder]

Richard-

Sheesh.
It's java.

I spent enough time with the developers over the last few days to get that 
right.
It's java running on their backend servers, not in your web client.
That's why you won't be able to see it from the client side.

> Ah yes.  "The Cathedral is Bizarre", or something like that. ;)
rotfl

> Stacks have both a UI and code.  The UI part is easy enough to translate. 
> Alejandro Tejada Capellan was inspired by my very modest Rev->SVG 
> translator and wrote a damn fine library for that: 
> <http://geocities.com/capellan2000/>.  More recently, I'm porting one of 
> my Rev apps to the web and finding the broad CSS support we get with most 
> browsers to be a godsend for translating fields and other objects and 
> appearance.

You can take rev a long ways with some css files and a little bit of ajax...

> Could I trouble you to explain a bit more about what you meant by "...a 
> workaround for the single-threading cgi engine issue that blocks 
> publishing stacks to the web"?

(trying to avoid bringing up this issue again... let me state first that if 
this turns into the usual flamefest about web publishing I'm ducking out and 
not contributing to it)

There's been a lot of discussion on this list over the years along the lines 
of <whine>I wrote this great game. why can't I just publish my stack on the 
web</whine>. And after quite a bit of research it turns out that since the 
rev engine is single-threaded and stacks aren't really designed to be 
multi-user and reentrant within a thread, you run into several issues trying 
to use rev as a cgi-engine. For instance, http has no concept of a session: 
each request is a new transaction. This doesn't bode well for a cgi engine 
trying to keep track of user variables. If you run fast-cgi then you keep 
your persistence but each new session has its own memory space. And it's 
possible to block the engine with simple commands that work fine from the 
desktop. Also, if you try to run a GUI command against a cgi engine ("answer 
'hello'", for example), your script just stops executing. Doesn't ignore the 
request, doesn't give you an error, just stops dead in its tracks.

Unless the engine gets rewritten (and I don't see either the need for this 
or the rev team putting it as a priority) then stacks simply won't be 
publishable on the web as written using the rev cgi engine. *Unless they're 
specifically written to be web stacks, avoiding the problem areas*. And yes, 
it's certainly doable, and fairly easily. But the point is that you have to 
think of designing a stack for the desktop or designing it for web use. The 
two are rarely going to coincide.

> I'm very interested in seeing where all this goes....

<g> me, too </g>

-- 
 Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net