Is Rev too "Mac focused"?

MisterX b.xavier at internet.lu
Sun Aug 8 01:50:45 EDT 2004


> On 8/7/04 5:54 PM, "MisterX" <b.xavier at internet.lu> wrote:
>
> > But it is easy and noticeably shorter and doesn't block RR...
> >
> > on doVBS x
> >   get shell("start" && x)
> > end doVBS
> >
> > Although not built in, these are easy to do with the shell type
> commands.
> > Unlike externals, they dont tie up the RR environment (dont have to) and
> > there's so many...
> >
> >> From there you can also access COM, and DLL objects too probably.
> > Check out shellcity.net for a good start at what is available...
>
> Xavier, I'm not saying there aren't workarounds. I do them myself, of
> course. But the 'shell("start")' only works if you have a VBS
> file to begin
> with, which must be written out before it can be performed. So it takes
> several lines to execute something which should be a one-liner in Rev.

True but once you have this written with wrappers it becomes more
transcript like. I haven't tried executing vbs directly in the
shell function but there must be a way. What I dont like about that is
that since there is no threading in RR, RR is stuck until your shell
code finishes running - IOW, if your shell is blocked, RR is blocked!

In a server situation, I needed to have a second RR made exe check if the
logs change and kill the process if it got stuck and relaunch it. So,
yes, this is a big shortcoming after all.

> Imagine if you had to create a text file with AppleScript in it
> and execute
> it from shell(). Of course you *could* do it, but it's much easier to use
> "do <script> as AppleScript".

Doesn't Applescript also block RR? In HC, I resorted to applets to do the
AS.

> And as to COM and DLL, once again, I shouldn't have to hunt around for
> command-line apps to call - I should be able to link directly to a DLL and
> execute a function that it contains.

I asked this one to our guru and he wasn't saying it would be easy. Rather
that you'd have to compile a different external for any DLL function kind
of in brief...

> My point was not to say that you *couldn't* do these kinds of
> things in Rev,
> but it is not straightforward enough to convince PC people who have done
> this forever with single line calls in other development environments.

Surely if there is a need, RR will look into it. Shall we make a bugzilla
request? ;) I'll vote on it...



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