Is it just me? The LiveCode website.

[Alex Tweedly]

I don't know, but I'm happy to make guesses - especially when it gives 
me a chance to rant a bit as well :-)

Runrev had a first attempt at tackling "the web" with revlets - which 
worked well, but stumbled and failed because by then it was becoming 
impossible to get anyone to install a player.

So they had to try a different approach, and LCServer was the right 
answer (IMO). (Of course the HTML5 project is an even more right answer, 
but this pre-dated HTML/CSS having enough capabilities to think about that).

The problem was, in those days before Open Source and Community Version, 
it was going to be a hard sell to get people to try LC as a server 
scripting language. Of coure, it was an easy sell into the existing user 
base - but that wasn't big enough, hey had to extend their user base.

Fortunately, they had some advantages of being able to invent language 
features without any legacy hold-ups. But even more than that, they had 
one "killer feature" - live, remote debugging of server scripts. What 
software developer wouldn't want that - server scripting but using the 
tools of today (IDE/intelligent debugger) rather than relying on 
debugging/logging code (like it was the 1980s again - which AFAIK it is 
for all other scripting languages).

Unfortunately (as I understand it), enabling the debugging involves 
significant modificaitons to a standard Apache installation - so not 
something that a casual "let's give it a try" user would be able to, or 
even be interested to, handle for themselves. Hence, a bundled web 
hosting package which allowed Runrev to set everything up, and to try 
out the features, in a controlled environment.

So - IMHO - providing a web hosting offering was a good idea.
And, IMHO, it was a failure, due to inadequate resources and development 
for the on-rev client.

It lacked many basic features that could, and should, have been there to 
make it really feel like a modern IDE-style environment. I could rant 
for hours about it :-), but I'll restrain myself. It was inadequately 
specced, and then on top of that it was slow, buggy and unsupported.

(And of course, it should never have been an 'on-rev client', it should 
have been a "remote LCServer IDE" which provided editing with full 
colouring, etc. plus file/directory mirroring with rsync and/or ftp 
upload and pluggable editors (to  allow open source editors for other 
languages - and it should hve done all that for any LC Server, and 
allowec debugging for any hosting service that allowed it - i.e. on-rev 
initially, and others if demand required it.

So anyway, the opportunities that came from providing their own web 
hosting service were never realized.

Whether or not it is profitable as it is, I have no idea. But I know it 
could have been much more than it is/was.

Alex.

On 04/07/2015 23:38, Peter Haworth wrote:
> I don't think I've been involved with Livecode long enough to know the
> answer to this but why did Livecode get into the web hosting business?  I
> hope it's profitable for them because it seems to cause them a lot of
> problems.
>
> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 2:22 PM Dave Kilroy <dave at applicationinsight.com>
> wrote:
>
>> livecode.com has been a bit of a yo-yo for the last day or so - up, down,
>> up,
>> down, up - and currently, down
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> "The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits." -
>> Albert Einstein
>> --
>> View this message in context:
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>> Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
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