RunRev Script Editor and Linux

[Richmond]

On 07/14/2010 08:32 PM, Pierre Sahores wrote:
> Dear Friends,
>
> Alike some others list fellows, i spended hundreds of hours to develop for and thousands of hours to run mc and rev apps under the Linux platform and here are my two cents about this :
>
> - Linux is suited to be one of the best server's platform (alike xBSD and Solaris, ...)
> - Linux is not well suited to be a real desktop platform (alike, OSX or Windows, ...)
>
> All the Rev stuff i target to the linux platform are only related to server's solutions : Rich Internet Application's Servers or Web Application's Servers. In beetwin 1997 and 2003, all my xTalks based servers apps went build and running as xinetd services on top ofApache + PHP + MC. In beetwin 2004 and 2009, i just changed this in replacing MC by Rev. From may 2009 to yet, all my new xtalk's based server's apps have been build on top of the on-rev platform.
>
> Conclusion 1 : All those apps went always 100% rock-solid and suiting all my clients and end-users needs. Soo, the Rev engine is 100% suited to run as expected on the Linux platform.
>
> All the solutions i ever developped for the Linux platform went coded under the MacOSX platform because the Rev IDE for Linux is always less polished than the OSX or Windows are.
>
> If i had to devlop a Rev desktop app to target the Linux platform (it's realy not the case...), i'm not sure that i would not have to spend 4/5 of my dev time in tunning my standalones to feet each main linux distro + KDE / each main linux distro + Gnome, etc... to get the expected results for each linux targeted platform.
>
> Conclusion 2 : Rev is probably not, at least for yet, the best dev platform to target the Linux Desktop's apps market....
>
> If i had to do such work indeed, i would choose to combine an HTML5/CSS framework (alike fluid 960 grid system) for the GUI part of the app and Rev to handle all the app logic running behind the scene.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Pierre
>
>
>    
Hmm . . . ???? ?? ????? ????????? ? ?? ????? ?? ????? ?????????; ? ????? 
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Vous ne voudrez pas un traduction; c'est pas beau . . .  :)

This reads like a strange apologetic to me:

1. RunRev works well on Linux on the server-side.

2. RunRev does not work well on Desktop machines.

I think that all those who work with RunRev on Linux are aware of 2., 
and as they do not, necessarily,
work with Linux servers 1. is fairly redundant information.

Now; RunRev's website states that RunRev can be used to "program once, 
deploy anywhere"; which
while not being strictly true (try taking a RunRev standalone for a walk 
on RISC OS 5) is taken
to mean that its standalones will function equally well on Macintosh, 
Windows and Linux.

This is just not true.

To get away from Linux for a moment: RunRev mucks up Unicode fonts when 
deployed under
Windows Vista.

Admittedly Vista should be a "coming thing already gone"; but buckets of 
people have paid
good money (I don't entirely understand why) for Windows Vista, and 
having spent their money are
not necessarily going to spend it all over again on Windows 7. Frankly, 
having been "burnt" by
Vista, and having invested in it, I would be wary, had I the money, of 
risking it again (especially having
spent quite a deal of time getting used to the quirks of Vista).

However; to get back to my specific grumble:

This has nothing really to do with how standalones do or do not function 
on Linux.

It has to do with the IDE and a problem with selecting text in the 
Script Editor while
ThunderBird e-mail client was running.

Most of the 'gripes' about the Linux version of RunRev 4 have less to do 
with standalones and more
to do with the development environment. It does, indeed, follow that 
many of the gripes that are applicable
to the Dev. environment carry over into standalones.

I have been using Personal Computers with a GUI for some 18 years now, 
and PCs for some 22 years;
and, have become used to expecting copy-paste to "just work". Now, from 
a long-term view one could
quite accurately  call me "spoilt", insofar as my BBC Master Compact 
cannot manage that. But, on the
other hand I can merrily copy-and-paste bidirectionally in the Terminal 
applications of both Mac OS and
Linux.

So. when I found that I was unable to copy a script (about file listing) 
to paste into my e-mail client I was,
to say the least, surprised. This is because I have become complacent 
enough to expect that capability to
be automatic in all the applications I use, whether they be on Mac, Win 
or Linux [and, even, on RISC OS 5].

As Open Office, AbiWord and so on [what we could, perhaps inaccurately, 
term Linux standards] can
cope with:

a. Font detection

b. Font resizing

c. Copy-pasting back and forth between 'everything'

I had supposed that those rather fundamental capabilites were 
prerequisites for any
Linux app that had to do with text.

AND, ultimately, I really cannot be fussed about minor gripes about how 
the UI of RunRev behaves and/or
looks different under Linux than Windows and Mac (and, after all, the UI 
looks and behaves differently
under those 2).

WHAT does fuss me is the loss of capability when compared with the Mac 
and Win versions.

 From a purely selfish point of view, it means that I am unable to 
deploy the result of months of work
(Devawriter and Devawriter Pro) on Linux; and that seems a pity.