Rev_rant

[Josh Mellicker]

Here is another newbie opinion:

Rather than comparing Rev to some ideal perfect dev solution (by the  
way, what is the name of that?), to me, the only pragmatic view is  
comparing it to other available options.

I have worked with (mostly past versions of) Flash, RealBasic, Xcode,  
Director, Filemaker, PHP and found them all to be buggy and/or kludgy  
development environments in many ways. Some of these are put out by  
huge multibillion dollar companies that would theoretically have  
sufficient resources to eliminate bugs and make the development  
environment elegant and easy.

So why haven't they?

Ever tried to hook Flash up to a database? Hope you have an unlimited  
painkiller prescription.  Ever tried to make Director QT playback and  
rollovers not sluggish on OS X? Ever tried to connect PHP with AJAX  
libraries to do things (like drag 'n' drop- that Rev will do in a  
single line of code). Ever tried to compile Windows XP executables  
with Xcode? ;-)

It's a jungle out there folks, let's face it. RR has and is  
continuing to do an incredible and often thankless job providing  
developers with a tool that, albeit far from perfect, gets the job  
done better (for many projects) than other options from multibillion  
dollar companies with hundreds of programmers, QC staff (what do they  
do all day?), and tech support (good luck ever getting a decent  
answer- or an answer at all).

RR rates at the top in my opinion in terms of a workable solution,  
and even higher because of the tireless job so many of the expert  
developers do supporting people on this list and with their many  
freely downloadable example stacks to help us newbies find the trail.

So here's a newbie saying a big hooray and smilie for RR, Heather,  
and all the great people on this list.

H O O R A Y !!!

: )