Realbasic on the web without plugins

[Richard Gaskin]

Keith Clarke wrote:

 > But even if it isn't easy, if RunRev don't grasp the nettle on
 > this, developers who must deploy standards-based rich apps into
 > cloud and locked-down Enterprise environments will be forced
 > elsewhere, which would be a shame.

I wrote about this last year:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2011-June/157979.html>

Like too many of my posts that's a long one, but it represents pretty 
much everything I came up with that's relevant to the discussion, and 
I've been thinking about this a long time since two of my biggest 
projects are all about the web and are based in LiveCode.

In short:

There are two sides to this, client and server.

On the server side RunRev has already provided what may be the most 
cost-effective solution for that with RevServer.

But the client is a whole other game, fully immersed not only in a very 
different language but also in a deeply well-defined object model that, 
in many respects, bears little resemblance to LiveCode's.

We use LiveCode because a good scripting language lets us build things 
more quickly than we could do in a lower-level language like C.

But JavaScript is not a low-level language.  It's almost as high-level 
as LiveCode, and as well integrated into the object model it supports as 
LiveCode is with its own.

But the object models are very different.

Attempting full translation of LiveCode to JavaScript would not be 
impossible, but very expensive.  IMO, when you consider the limitations 
inherent in such a task, it's probably much more expensive than just 
learning JavaScript.

That said, there are many opportunities for using LiveCode to generate 
some portions of the client-side experience for the web.  A starting 
point was outlined here in 2006:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2006-June/083956.html>

I haven't used the RB/web implementation, but I'd be surprised if it did 
full RB->JavaScript translation; my guess is that the server side is 
very much like RevServer and the client side is like the ToolBook 
approach I outlined in 2006.

We can have that too, and we needn't wait for anything from RunRev - 
anyone with sufficient time and motivation can build this today.

But somewhere along the way you'll eventually find limitations between 
what LiveCode can do on the desktop and what a translation to a 
different object model will be able to do on the web.  There's more to 
apps than forms.

And for those you'll want to use JavaScript.

Fortunately, it's kinda fun to learn and there are orders of magnitude 
more resources for that than we have for all the things we've learned 
about LiveCode.

Dive in, the water's fine.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv