Teething troubles

[Marcus Bointon]

I'm new to Revolution, but have plenty of experience in Director and RB, and
I'm having a few problems with Revolution, so here's a whole bunch of
questions.

I'm developing an app that has no visual interface at all - it reads the
contents of a file and decides whether to launch some other apps on the
basis of what it finds. So far I have built this in about 30 lines of code
as a stack script all triggered from an openstack message. I have set the
(unused) window to be invisible. Revolution crashed with a type 2 when I
also turned off the "buffer display" window property - I figured there was
no point in having a buffer for a window with no contents that would never
be seen.

While trying a test with this stack, I accidentally selected "suspend
revolution UI". Everything effectively became unusable, and the restore
interface button did nothing. If I put the mouse near the menu bar, it acted
like I was pressing the button up & down about once per second. Very odd. I
had to force-quit to get out of it.

Is there any equivalent of classes like in RB and Director? I'm used to just
being able to say new(script "whatever") to instantiate new objects on the
fly, especially non-visual abstract things. These don't have a place in the
stack/card/button/object metaphor that I have found.

While trying to debug things, particularly using the message window to send
messages I find that often the errors generated don't reflect the problem,
for example I find that "handler not defined" usually means there is an
error in the handler in question that prevents it from compiling, rather
than it not existing, but I can't find any way of it getting me any more
detail than that. When I do manage to get a proper error dialogue appearing,
more often than not it's an error in the Revolution IDE, rather than
anything I've written which was initially very confusing as I couldn't
figure out where all this code was coming from! I feel like I'm missing
something like the "recompile now" button in Lingo.

I sometimes find the debugger is out of sync with my code, even if I close
it, force an apply, and reopen the debugger, it may still show an old
version. This seems intermittent.

Arrays (which are like lingo property lists to me) seem to act oddly in
places. For example, it's easy to display some info using "put the keys of
someArray", but if I say "put someArray" I get a vast amount of garbage
characters in the message window rather than anything meaningful (in fact
this crashed Revolution on one occasion).

The split command seems to expect data in value/name pairs rather than
name/value, e.g. If I want to set some values thus:

name=widget
size=20
colour=yellow

I can't split this using return and "=" as it will come out the wrong way
around, as in widget=name etc. Something more powerful like the Perl split
command would be great.

What's the standard or usual way of handling XML in revolution?

DefaultFolder seems not terribly clever. By default it points to the
revolution app. It would be more useful if it pointed to the current stack.
Director has separate names for these places (applicationPath and
moviePath). It would also be very convenient if it appeared with a trailing
separator - but make it consistent across platforms, unlike Director! I
can't find a way of getting the current stack's path.

As a feature request, could we have native support for gestalt selectors on
both Windows and MacOS? On Windows, gestalt is provided through QuickTime
and is a very handy way of assessing the installed state of components and
versions.

Anyway, I'm sure that's enough to be getting on with!

Thanks,

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture

marcus at synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk