Questions about Rev/Transcript vs. other toolkits

[Kevin Walzer]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'm a relatively novice Mac developer who's done most of my work in
AppleScript and AppleScript Studio. (See my website,
http://www.wordtech-software.com/aqua.html for some samples.)  I started
with these tools to get familiar with programming logic and GUI
development, and I've also done some brief learning with C just to get
the feel for it. Now I'm interested in learning things that will run on
multiple platforms. I'm in the process of studying Tcl/Tk, and also plan
to look at C++ (Qt), Java (Swing) and Python (wxPython).

I ran across Rev and downloaded the demo, and have played with it a bit.
It's very intriguing--on just about an hour of playing with it, it seems
very similar to AppleScript Studio in many ways, and the
cross-compilation--Windows, Mac Classic and OS X, Linux, and every
flavor of Unix under the sun--is really slick.  This is clearly a
serious development environment. I could spend a *long* time learning
this toolkit, and it feels comfortable enough to make that process
enjoyable.

However, because Rev, unlike the other languages and toolkits I'm
looking at, is a commercial toolkit and would represent a fairly
substantial investment on my part for what is a hobby (as opposed to a
professional investment), I'm wondering if some of the more seasoned
developers on this list would mind answering a few questions:

1. How closely does Rev resemble AppleScript--not in terms of its hooks
into the Mac OS, but on a more general scale--its syntax, its
programming logic, etc.? Does a background in AppleScript and
AppleScript Studio lessen the learning curve somewhat?

2. How does Rev compare to other cross-platform toolkits such as Qt and
Java/Swing? Does it have limitations over what these other systems can
do? Does it have advantages?

3. How does Rev compare specifically to other scripting languages,
especially Tcl/Tk and Python/wxPython? I'm studying Tcl/Tk out of a
slightly contrarian nature, as I know the GUI's that can be built with
Tk are more limited; wxPython, by contrast, is very rich. Can anyone
with experience with either of these development environments offer some
insight about how they compare to Rev?

4. Documentation. I note that Rev seems to come with fairly
comprehensive documentation built-in--the API reference, Transcript
dictionary, and some basic tutorials. I found it a bit hard to navigate,
although this may be something that can be overcome with a greater
investment of time. However, Apple has both a very complete (300+ plus
pages) API reference for AppleScript and AppleScript Studio, and
detailed introductory materials, that made learning AppleScript very
easy. I also note that there is a large pool of third-party
documentation on AppleScript, both informal (websites) and formal
(O'Reillly books). The same is true, especially, for Qt, Tcl/Tk (I just
spent $60 on two nice Prentice Hall books on Qt and Tcl) and of course
Java. By contrast, I haven't noticed a large pool of documentation for
Rev outside of that which comes with the application. Is it out there,
and I just haven't seen it? Is there an O'Reilly book in the works? I
guess I'm curious as to what additional independent resources there are
for learning Transcript apart from what comes with Rev itself.

I appreciate any advice anyone can give me!

- --
Kevin Walzer, PhD
WordTech Software--Open Source Applications and Packages for OS X
http://www.wordtech-software.com
http://www.smallbizmac.com
http://www.kevin-walzer.com
mailto:sw at wordtech-software.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFBGYzPF6m9qPmThLQRApv7AJ9OCgEh/DdjKtloCiLsbtPZLpJIEQCfQbaJ
hSrZ8RkdBMDegdooVlZh+6s=
=0pUc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----