Team Development / Exporting stuff to text files

[Chipp Walters]

Richard, thanks...couldn't have said it better..but I will add a footnote...

David, another point to understand is the recompilation of a complete
stack from text files, is a very difficult, if not impossible task to
undertake. I should know. I worked with David Johnson for over a year
on a sharing toolkit (RevShare) which allowed users to update in
realtime each others projects over the internet. It was a complex
issue and one where I concluded it could not be done solely via text
data.

In particular, IIRC, the following properties couldn't be trusted to
always convert exactly:

"id"
"visited"
"layer"
"armed"
"htmlText"

Perhaps there were more. But creating a perfect copy of a control on
one stack from a text string from another stack was difficult. I had
an object checksum function, and I had to remove the above properties
from it as I could not depend on accurate control management without.

Not to mention all of the images, movies, etc..which would need to be
managed as well. All in all, I doubt one will find a better
'container' for managing such stuff than the stack itself.

Furthermore, if open source was such a grand concept for the Rev
community as a whole, why haven't we seen more of it? My personal
opinion, is like many of my plugins, and other free Rev stuff, they
really only need a single person to code it. Many moons ago, Richard,
Jacque and myself tried to create a 'team approach' to creating a new
property editor-- I believe we ended up each rolling our own.

That said, the MetaCard project, I suppose could be included as a
successful open source project, but it was pretty much well on it's
way BEFORE being open sourced.

-Chipp