Revolution vs other solutions

[Jesse Sng]

Hi,

I'm writing this to all those who had made their own evaluations to 
switch to Revolution for comment.

I've been monitoring this list and reading the discussions for some 
time while doing some small evaluations of Revolution from time to 
time as I was anticipating a rather large project that would kick off 
in the near future.

Well after quite a bit of time, it looks like things are definitely 
going to kick off real soon.

The project involves the automation of page layout from a set of text 
data, integrating that with the workflow of a graphics dept in a 
publishing company to build a final document within Adobe InDesign.

This will involve tracking of graphics files (photoshop, tiff, PDF), 
XML, text parsing, AppleScript integration with InDesign and also 
building a publication database out of the exported text data that 
will come to us. That will mean that I will also need some sort of 
robust but lightweight database solution that's integrated with 
Revolution and can support multiple users.

This project is an entire REWRITE of a 15 yr old system that I had 
delivered to them in 1990. The system was built around QuarkXpress 
and I had written a plug in to do all that using Quark's ver 2.x 
APIs. It's interesting that because of the CEO's insistence that they 
do not upgrade to Quark 3.0 and they milk every bit of the system for 
what it was worth, that we have this desperate situation today that 
they must go for a full rewrite as the system can no longer be 
upgraded.

It has been running since then and my last bug fix was somewhere in 
1992 and they are still running on the old Quark 2.1x application. 
They could not go past System 8.0 without breaking QuarkXpress and 
that meant that they could not go with a machine more recent than a 
Mac blue & white G3. Nothing can move forward now without breaking 
one of the key components and it's so long ago that none of the 
source code exists as my original company has ceased to exist some 
years ago.

The fact is that I've been making most of my assumptions that I will 
be building this using Revolution, integrating with InDesign and 
Finder via AppleScript. I might also work with them on integrating 
Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand so that everything works very 
smoothly.

At this point in time, I guess what I'm looking for is to find out if 
there's any good reason for me NOT to use Revolution. I've worked 
with Hypercard/Supercard since the late 80s and am at home with 
xTalk, but used to write lots of plug ins for HC/SC and also Quark 
though I much prefer not to.

Key considerations here are 1. commitment to move Rev from PowerPC to 
Intel and I will probably be eligible for MacTel seeding so this is 
something I want to test. 2. Stability - it's nice not to have the 
system break because of my own code but I and the users would be very 
helpless if the underlying engine breaks for reasons beyond our 
control.3. the existence of a pool of "smart friends", something that 
I'm already certain exist on this mailing list.

I would probably need to look at some form of XML manipulation 
library that is not memory based and is also fast.

I have considered using Supercard 4.5 and also RealBasic - both of 
which I'm extremely familiar with but I have doubts at this point in 
time as to whether SC can give me everything I need plus it's 
checkered history makes me wary. RealBasic can do the job, but 
somehow I won't have as much time to work on this as I used to, plus 
I don't think I'm going to enjoy the development experience quite as 
much as I've built working apps with it before.

So I guess this is a rather strange request - does anyone have a good 
reason why I should not use Rev at all? :-)

I'm being pulled out of retirement from software development to do 
this thing and right now, I'm starting from scratch including having 
to incorporate a company just to do this thing. The users have 
searched for the last 5 or 6 years to find someone who can replace 
the system and it keeps coming back to me even though I tried to turn 
them down some years ago.


Jesse Sng