Code Samples/Comparisons

[Bernard Devlin]

David, I'll have to confess then, I just don't get it.  If that's the
new focus of RunRev then I'm not sure that a new visitor to their
website would come away with that vision.

Most of the focus of the www.runrev.com seems to be on traditional
fat-client development.  The other day I was looking at a tutorial
somewhere on their site which did seem to fit more with the vision
you're describing (it was a tutorial on using Ajax to dynamically
update a list of names on a webpage using jsquery), I remember
thinking that it seemed like so much effort, and a long way from the
way in which we are used to working in Rev.  My thought on seeing that
tutorial was that I might as well be using something else rather than
Rev to do that.

To my mind it is a mistake to think that one can compete for mindshare
with free technologies like ruby and javascript, or with entrenched
for-pay products like flash/flex/air.  As if things like php and flash
don't have enough compelling reasons to use them as technologies for
web development (open source, free, widely available, well-known,
etc.), they also have masses of books and tutorials available, and
masses of libraries/products/samples that drive and subsist in their
respective ecosystems.

Have you seen this: http://280atlas.com/what.php ?  280 North's
cappucino had rave reviews when it went public (I guess Apple
die-hards like to see obj-c boosted).  Many people are very impressed
with Atlas.  But many also balk at paying $20 or so to support its
development.  And it's not like there aren't other (maybe less
elegant) tools that allow one to generate whole Ajaxy websites from an
IDE using just one language e.g. Morfik (www.morfik.com).  But I think
even Morfik is struggling to survive, and the whole company and
technology was created with the sole aim of simplifying web app
development to just one language.

At least both Morfik and Atlas have videos demonstrating how these
tools are used prominently displayed from their front pages.

Maybe you're right that financially it is better to get a smaller
piece of a much bigger pie.  Time will tell.  Good luck to them.  I'm
glad that Rev 4.0 has received more publicity than previous releases.

Regards, Bernard

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:43 PM, David Bovill <david.bovill at gmail.com> wrote:
> True - but not the right way round IMO. To get new people into the language
> (at this point in internet history), you need to give them tools to do what
> they want to do. The fact is very few people want to make desktop
> applications or fat clients (ok relatively few). Most kids if they want to
> make anything it is a web site, a plugin for Facebook, or a game. The target
> audience you are talking about is pre-Web2.0 and pre-easy to author game
> IDE's - people have (except for a niche market) moved their focus away for
> desktop/fat clients and onto these other areas now.
>
> What it makes sense for RunRev to target is people who want to do the above,
> but are put off with the intelligibility of the programming languages they
> need to learn to do that. The second thing they need to do is make these
> same people feel that learning to do it the RunRev way will help them move
> into "the real thing" - that is making popular commercial or non-profit
> games, web sites.
>
> RunRev is in a good position to meet the first demand with the server side
> scripting language, and the plugin, but it is a bit harder to see how they
> are effectively addressing the second.