Rev 3.0 crashing on OS X too (as well as Vista and Linux)

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Oct 14 18:57:05 EDT 2008


Chipp Walters wrote:

> Something Richard Gaskin mentioned, I believe at the RevMasters Summit
> awhile back, might shed some light. I don't remember his exact words,
> but to paraphrase he said designing an application was significantly
> harder than designing a tool. A tool should allow for a desired
> outcome to be performed without crashing. An application should
> prevent a user from taking any path which prevents the desired outcome
> from being performed-- and should never crash.
> 
> I think I've always thought of Rev as a tool.

I wish I could take credit for that, but I was paraphrasing Steven 
McConnell, from either Code Complete or Rapid Development.  He was 
talking about the orders-of-magnitude difference in effort to build a 
tool vs. a product, and he characterized it like this:

"With a tool, it need only be possible to use it correctly.  But with a 
product it should be impossible to use it incorrectly."

I've always considered the MC IDE a tool. :)

> Certainly this doesn't provide immediate help for Bernard. But, I
> might suggest he consider posting some of the code he's trying to run
> in order to see if there are some obvious scripting errors being made,
> which might take the IDE and engine down.

This may sound overly simplistic, but the way to diagnose any problem is 
to find the differences between the working and non-working states.

With Rev apps, so much can come into play:  the engine, the IDE, RAM, 
the OS, the hard drive, etc.

Swapping out the IDE is a relatively small change which can help reduce 
the solution space significantly.  But in all fairness, unless Bernard 
is familiar with the MC IDE it may not be a good test, since he won't 
likely be spending as much time in it or doing the same sorts of tasks 
he might in Rev.

It may also be worthwhile running a RAM checker and a low-level disk 
checker on the system in question, to help rule out those issues.

If it's crashing as frequently as it seems, it should be relatively easy 
to find enough of a pattern to eventually get to an isolated recipe. 
Let's hope....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com



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