Standard Library

[Richard Gaskin]

JB wrote:

> Revolution Standard Library was put together by
> Richard Gaskin and Ken Ray and provides a lot
> of useful handlers.

May I ask which ones you found useful?  It might just motivate me to 
resume the project.

> Is the code allowed to be used in a commercial
> program royalty free and if so what would be the
> proper information to list in the product showing
> it is being used and plus the proper credits.

If I recall correctly the intention was to release it under the MIT 
license - MIT is very permissive, and GPL-compatible; commercial work 
definitely allowed, as are proprietary modifications (though it would be 
cool if you chose to enhance anything there and shared it back so we can 
update the master).

May I ask where you stumbled across it?  If we still have that posted 
online we should definitely put a proper license on it.

> Has the library been updated recently and if so
> where can it be downloaded?

We haven't updated it in a very long time. Both of us have been too busy 
with client projects, and to be honest it was one of those ideas that 
seemed simple enough when we got started, but the more we planned it out 
the more it became clear that to be truly useful it needed to break from 
its original goal as a library into more of a framework.  Frameworks can 
be useful, but they tend to require a MUCH steeper learning curve to 
use, so we weren't sure how many people would be interested.

For example, a lot of the stuff we were doing became dependent on a 
global array called gAppInfo, which made all sorts of other things much 
simpler to sort out (prefs subfolder names, the app name, version info, 
and more could be stored there for one-stop shopping for other handlers 
and even other interoperable tools).  But that meant that you had to be 
sure to initialize that global at the beginning of your app's code.

I like to think of a good library as a collection of discrete handlers, 
in which you can call anything you need but only when you need it, and 
you only need to learn the one you want to use.

Once we start down the road of requiring users to learn all sorts of 
other things to use any of it at all, which worked out fine for Ken and 
I since for whatever odd reason we wound up adopting almost completely 
parallel architectural habits anyway.  But for others to use, it seemed 
like it would get an ever smaller potential audience the deeper we went 
with it, so we've just been working on our own stuff since.

In fact, you're the first person to bring it up in years.  So maybe the 
idea can be resurrected....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com