java?

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Sat Sep 17 14:07:23 EDT 2005


Eric Engle wrote:
> My current development strategy is to use hypercard for classic and then port
> to metacard for windows and os x. It seems a workable strategy. 

Workable in the sense that you can drive a nail with a screwdriver if 
you're sufficiently determined; just not optimal. :)

Rev's language and object model go far beyond HC's.  Limiting yourself 
to HyperCard and working in that foreign and, unfortunately at this 
point, obsolete file format just adds an extra step and offers little 
benefit for the trouble.

Moreoer, it locks you into Classic at a time when Apple's doing 
everything they can do put that OS to rest, so it'll only become 
increasingly difficult to maintain such a workflow.  For example, Apple 
has already said that there will be no Classic support in their new 
Mactel machines, and those are only nine months away.

What would be the difficulty in authoring Rev stacks natively in Rev?

If the HC UI is attractive have you considered Alain Farmer's FreeGUI?
Remember that unlike HC, with Transcript the IDE UI is 100% cutomizable.

...
>  But I don't think there is a good hypercard/revolution solution for
> online distribution (i.e. you cannot yet run a stack from within a
> browser).

Just for clarification, the Web and the Internet are not synonymous, and 
the HTTP is not limited to browsers per se.

So while it's not possible to "run a stack from within a browser" you 
can craft a nearly infinite variety of other UIs for "online distribution".

If you need to run your app specifically inside of a browser window, 
Java or Flash are great solutions.

But if the goal is to deliver applications over the Internet using 
standard protocols (HTTP, FTP), that's already built into Rev.  And 
thanks to Dave Cragg's work on libURL, most of what you'd need to do are 
one-liners.

With Rev you also have a POST command to send info to a CGI, and if you 
can run Rev on the server you can have Transcript driving both the 
client and server sides.

And you also have raw socket support to you can make just about anything 
else your heart desires, from chat clients to even custom web servers 
(Scott Raney made a simple web server some years ago, and Andre's 
expanded that into quite a sweet suite).

While the promised simplicity of having Java run automatically in a 
browser seems attractive, in practice it doesn't seem simple to achieve. 
  Maybe it's a Mozilla/Firefox thang, but I run across a good many Java 
applets that just don't run well with Apple's JVM.

And when they do, the nature of browser-delivered media means I have to 
download the entire UI and code every time I access it.

In contrast, a custom web app built with Rev can maintain its own 
persistent cache completely under your control, so it operates more like 
the AOL client in which UI elements are downloaded only once and reused 
locallty, so the experience just gets snappier and snappier with each 
session.

And then there are the UI considerations, described at:
<http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/netapps.html>

So in short, if you truly need to deply within the confines of a browser 
window, with some effort you may find Java a great solution.

But if the goal is Internet deployment, you may find you can do 
everything you need, and perhaps a bit more, right in Transcript.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com



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