Revolution Media Presentation Viewable on Web?

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Jun 27 17:18:09 EDT 2006


Bill Marriott wrote:

> Apple publicly demonstrated a plugin that enabled HyperCard stacks to be run 
> within web pages. Unfortunately it never saw distribution. Flash and 
> Director both have connections to HyperCard from way back. Frankly, a 
> web-plugin is a natural for Rev. It would let us developers write games and 
> really awesome interfaces to data sources... the mind boggles at the 
> possibilities.
> 
> What we're really talking about is a new distribution channel for our 
> creative work. All the philosophical musings about whether the plugin wars 
> are over or whether Rev is an apple or an orange are moot. The dust has far 
> from settled on the Internet.

If you can get backing for the development of such a plugin I'm fairly 
confident RunRev would happily receive the money.

But in my experience such investors are hard to find.  I've not had a 
conversation with them yet that didn't end with "Why not just use Flash?"

> I'd like to see Rev make a nice web plugin. A meg or 2 isn't really that 
> awful nowadays. The key issue would be security/sandbox concerns. 

The Rev engine already provides support for a very strong level of 
security, both in the Player and available to any standalone with the 
secureMode property, which prevents all file I/O, registry settings, 
shell commands, and other such calls that can be used for malicious ends.

But like you say, that doesn't address the ubiquity question, the desire 
to be able to have nothing more than a URL to experience the software.

A plugin doesn't address that either, since it would still need to be 
downloaded and installed just like any app, so I'm not certain that's 
really the best option (try having that conversation with university or 
hospital IT staff and the knowledgeable ones will raise as many 
questions about a new plugin as they would about a new app).


So what to do for presentation?


Well, why not use the world's most popular presentation layer on the web?

When we consider that the browser experience really deals with only a 
subset of what Rev can deliver, maybe there's a whole different way to 
approach this: JavaScript/DHTML (what newcomers to web development are 
now calling "AJAX").

JS provides interactivity in a scripting engine everyone already has 
installed, and can handle a reasonable subset of the sorts of Rev things 
that would make sense within a browser window.

One could even take this idea further by incorporating SVG so you can 
have vectors as well (I have a prototype SVG exporter for Rev in RevNet, 
and there are more complete implementations around).  And since SVG now 
incorporates SMIL as a subset, you have support for synchronized 
time-based media too.

The full range of things Rev can do would be close to impossible to make 
a Transcript-to-JavaScript translator for, but again if you need a 
browser presentation you're probably only needing a fairly narrow subset 
anyway.

ToolBook provided some handy support for this sort of deployment, 
providing native libraries with correlating JavaScript libraries for the 
subset of things that make the most sense in a browser.

There's no reason this couldn't be done in Rev, using a set of templates 
and wizards on the Rev side and generating corresponding 
JavaScript/DHTML for web output, just like ToolBook did.

Like Google Maps and Google Earth, there are cool things you can do in a 
browser and even cooler things you can do in a dedicated app.  If Google 
Maps represents "Web 2.0", the dedicated Google Earth app represents 
"Web 3.0". :)  But for those who want ubiquity it's hard to beat a good 
browser implementation, and with JavaScript/DHTML being just text it's 
not all that hard to generate when you have an engine that works so 
gracefully with chunk expressions.

With all the talk of open source support in this community, such an 
effort based around these open standards on the presentation side should 
be relatively easy to have at least a basic library and some tools for 
this in short order.

This would provide an answer for the subset of people who want this sort 
of thing, and it wouldn't cost RunRev Ltd. anything to see it happen. 
The company wouldn't need to be distracted from their core mission in 
any way, and the community would get one more "yes" answer to a common 
deployment question.  A win-win for all.

So, who's up for herding cats? :)

I'll bet a reasonable v1.0 that addresses the sort of things the Media 
templates make could be knocked off in under under two weeks' 
development time....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com



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