What's The Verdict, Web or Not?

[Chipp Walters]

Bill,

No, not a waste of time, but I agree with your point:

>> We might as well "invest" our time learning those technologies if
>> you're right and we're "worth our salt."

Frankly, I mentioned to Dan Shafer earlier this evening, I wish I had
the same prowess in AJAX as I do in Rev, as I'm sure I'd have more
business-- and for sure a larger market- and one not dominated by a
single company. While I suppose they're on the right track these days,
they do keep changing course, especially with their low-end product.

Don't get me wrong. I really *enjoy* working with RunRev. It frankly
bothers me that there's not a serious buzz about how absolutely (to
use a Steve Jobs phrase) 'insanely great' this tool REALLY is! But the
limited resources of a small company, no matter how wisely spent,
prevent this development system from gaining wide acceptance. As this
thread clearly points out, newcomers (aka Greg) have a hard time
figuring out what RR's good for.

The fact I can build a complete cross-platform application for a
client, soups to nuts, in only a couple of days is simply lost on a
majority of potential users.

Case in point. A couple of months ago, on a Tuesday afternoon, a
client asked me to built a Chart Wizard tool for creating dashboard
images for PowerPoint presentations. Said he needed it by end of day
Wednesday.

Mac version:
http://www.gadgetplugins.com/chippstuff/ChartWizard_Setup.dmg
PC version:
www.gadgetplugins.com/chippstuff/ChartWizard.zip

You can't get any faster than that in RAD tools (as far as I know).
Sure, I have some pre-built libraries (but not the chart one), and
some tools to help me with layout management and interface, but
still-- less than 2 days is really fast. And it's not because I'm a
great programmer, it's really the tool that's great.

All that said, We still don't have paying clients knocking down our
doors with apps in hand. Lots of reasons, but IMO, the biggest is the
lack of exposure of RR in Enterprise or really anywhere else. Not even
sure if one would really consider it Enterprise software?

One more story before signing off. I met with Eric Schmidt back when
he was CTO for Sun at one of those 'networking conferences' in Palm
Springs. We chatted a bit and he asked me about Java and how our
company liked it. I told him it was 'way too slow' for multimedia
apps-- which our company built.

He replied, "Yes, but as long as we stay visible and continue
improving, and keep the buzz up, it won't matter." Of course he was
correct. I was talking about technology, he was talking about
marketing. That same mistake is made over and over by us
techno-dweebs, who have difficulty understanding even crappy products,
marketed well, succeed (think WalMart).

Funny sidenote: Macromedia had a great (FAST) product in Director back
then, but forced everyone to place a "Made with Director" label on
everything done, which effectively moved them ONLY to the minor
leagues and eventually OFF the playing field. IMO, Director could have
competed with JAVA if some changes were made. Heck, even HC could
compete if targeted correctly. Nowdays, even hardcore C types are
looking seriously into all sorts of scripting languages, from Flash
(ActionScript) to Python, Ruby, etc.. No doubt HyperTalk could've
competed.

So, yes, I would like to be able to code as quickly and efficiently in
AJAX,DOM, whatever, but sadly, I think I'm already too spoiled using
RunRev.

best,
Chipp