The Roadmap

[Matthias Rebbe]

Thanks Bernard.

Exactly what I think. Only I could not express it that way in English.

Matthias

Matthias Rebbe

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> Am 30.10.2019 um 17:17 schrieb Bernard Devlin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>>:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 7:00 PM Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> If it were up to me I'd ditch it altogether.
>> 
> 
> Whatever frustrations I have with Livecode they are vastly outweighed by
> the things that it can do and the things it can do now that it couldn't do
> a decade ago.
> 
> I don't think people appreciate what an incredible achievement it is.  As I
> used to be a Lotus Notes developer, I can see the contrast.  IBM recently
> sold their Lotus technologies to an Indian company for $1.8bn. Over the
> last ten years a company the size of IBM could not successfully manage the
> development of a cross-platform application development environment.   For
> an entire decade IBM only added the v.9 release and fixpacks (and Notes 9.0
> was actually Notes 8.5.4 but re-branded).
> 
> Notes used to exist in native clients for OS/2, Windows, MacOS.  IBM
> jettisoned the native clients and moved to running the entire thing inside
> the JVM.  It took IBM about 15 years to move from Notes 7 to Notes 10.
> When I recently downloaded Notes 10 to do some programming on thousands of
> emails (the very thing where Notes should shine) the client crashed
> repeatedly on trying to import the emails.  Bear in mind that Notes even
> has a menu action to import emails from a folder, so importing emails to
> process the text is not even something that requires any programming, it's
> that basic to the product.  Having moved from programming in C with all the
> possible problems with pointers and memory allocation, Notes was moved to a
> language with garbage collection and memory management and still the client
> crashes doing basic things it could do 15 years ago.
> 
> By comparison in the last 10 to 15 years Livecode has added app delivery
> for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows64 and HTML5 to Windows32 and OSX.  That's
> more than IBM ever managed to do and a movement in the opposite direction
> to that taken by IBM.  And as well as doing this Livecode re-architected
> the engine.   IBM's major new feature over the last decade (XPages) looks
> like it is now almost certainly going to be thrown away.  By moving to the
> JVM for the development environment IBM was banking on delivering most
> Notes apps as web apps.
> 
> Obviously the Notes servers do a whole range of things that Livecode
> doesn't do.  But these server-side technologies were mostly in the Notes
> product 15 years ago. Going back 15 years ago and Livecode was at v2.5.
> Remember back then?  The clipboarddata was a new thing.  We didn't have a
> built-in web browser, nor multi-dimensional arrays, nor unicode, nor the
> datagrid, nor behaviors, nor widgets, nor xslt,  nor the enhanced liburl.
> That's just off the top of my head.
> 
> IBM with all their resources and access to capital markets couldn't hold
> themselves to their own limited roadmap.  Livecode has successfully moved
> forward with a cross-platform solution when IBM couldn't do so.  And
> without having $billions to play with.  They shouldn't attempt to hold to a
> roadmap when the elephant in the room can't do it.  And IBM never allowed
> businesses to use Notes for free nor did they open the source code.
> Livecode did that and has a free edition which contains probably 99% of the
> functionality of the most expensive license.
> 
> I think many of us lose sight of this small company's achievements.
> 
> Regards, Bernard
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