Rev and open source (was "What Rev Needs")

[Devin Asay]

On Dec 8, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> David Bovill wrote:
>> My experience too - it has been the only way I have ever  
>> succeeded  interesting any truly bright under 25 year olds - the  
>> main thing that  puts them off is the lack of an open source  
>> strategy. They go yeah  this is great - but is it open source? Now  
>> it does not need to be  open source to convince them - they just  
>> need to see how it can not  just fit in, but be a Revolutionary  
>> part of all those cool open  source projects they are dying to get  
>> their teeth into.
>
> Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for an  
> engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?

Richard,

A recent experience I had illustrates, I think, what David means.  
Earlier this year I was writing a room scheduling application in Rev.  
One of the features was that people who requested to schedule the  
room had to be officially associated with the university. The obvious  
answer was our enterprise LDAP server (open source technology). Rev  
can't query LDAP directly, but BSD Unix (open source) has a utility  
called ldapsearch. PHP (open source) can also do LDAP searches. I  
opted for the latter, because that made my project easier to take  
cross platform. So I found an open source PHP script that would do  
the search and return the results as HTML (an open source protocol).  
I deployed the script on our apache web server (open source) and used  
a Rev 'get URL <url>' command to grab the results, which I easily  
parsed in Transcript to get exactly what I needed. When my app  
verifies, from LDAP, that the requester is officially permitted to  
schedule, it records the scheduled event in a mysql database (open  
source).

I have other Rev apps that have similarly pulled together disparate  
technologies quickly and easily into a Rev front end. In my opinion  
this is an area in which Rev excels--as a rapid development platform  
for writing front ends to other technologies. In effect, Rev  
increases the power and reach of the latter, showing itself to be an  
easy-to-learn "glue" for open source stuff that's often opaque to non- 
propeller-heads.

My $.03 (inflation, you know.)

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University