The State of Rev (Was Re: [ANN] Rodeo IDE preview video)

Andre Garzia andre at andregarzia.com
Mon May 31 09:32:59 EDT 2010


Folks,

Motivated by the discussion started by Peter, I decided to write a piece.
First following the split in two classes that Peter did, I don't think that
Rev is not suitable for professional development by the second class. For
those that did not read Peter piece, he does not mean a first and second
class that are on some kind of hierarchy but an horizontal split where the
first group is the one that bought many addons and the second group is using
plain old vanilla rev. He then argues that the second group is loosing its
value since many things that should be in rev are then in the paid third
party addons and that people from the second group might migrate to some
other language due to the increased need for third party paid tools to
create professional software. This is just a summary. I am here doing a
counter-post detailing my own experience with Rev in the last months and
years which I think is valuable to this specific discussion.

I own ALL of the Rev addons, I even own multiple licenses for the addons and
for Rev itself since I am a sucker for bundles. I am also on a very good
position in the community since I went to all the Rev conferences that
happened so far, so this gives me perspective and passport stamps. In the
last few years I've shipped both desktop applications and web applications,
all of which were professional. Even though I have all the addons, there's
only two addons I ever used in a professional project. Not that the addons
are useless or not to be trusted, they are all wonderful but so is Rev, so
even though I use a lot of addons on my own projects, I could handle most of
my development with pure Rev.

The last software I built which is the Hinduism Today Navigator ( available
at http://www.hinduismtoday.com/ ) is my first professional software to use
third party addon. It uses SQL Yoga and GLX App Framework (a close addons
and a FOSS one). Using those libraries cut my development time but that does
not mean that I could not do it without them. The previous version called
Hinduism Today Digital Edition was a pure Rev application and worked quite
well. The benefit of SQL Yoga and GLX App Framework was that I could borrow
Trevors brain a little which is way better than mine and let him solve the
database and bootstrapping stuff for me thru the use of his own libraries.
It is like delegation, could I build myself some kind of generic database
layer for me, yes I could, would it be SQL Yoga, hell no, SQL Yoga is just
magical. Can you ship professional software without it, yes you can.

Using the knowledge I acquired from The Richard Gaskin Institute Of
Successful Business Studies,  I learned all that the third party addons do
is reduce your development/support time which in return helps your ROI which
makes your business more likely to succeed. Most of Rev addons are Rev built
anyway. Sometimes is a wise investment to use third party tools to improve
your business, some other times, you can just do without it.

I strong believe that the sign that a development community is actually
evolving is the appearance of commercial third party tools. That usually
means that there is a healthy market in it and the key word in this is
healthy and not market. It means that entrepreneurs see that there is
an opportunity there to make an investment and that they believe this will
be good since the community is healthy.

The appearance of third party tools also show us where Rev could use some
more love. Entrepreneurs will often ship products that will cover some Rev
deficiency or extend some feature with things that are desired by a great
bunch of people. By seeing which addons are more popular, one can grok where
Rev needs to improve.

Like Peter said, the current Linux version is almost unusable. While the
engine is solid, the IDE is quite flaky (thanks dictionary.app for the right
adjective). There is a huge need for improvement in the Linux area before
Rev can be used by sane professionals in that OS. I would like to migrate
all my development to Linux soon but right now I can't. Like me there are
others.

As for tRev, Rodeo and other wizardries by Jerry. They like the
flux capacitors in Back to The Future, while a DeLorean is a nice
professional car, that gizmo makes it something unique. tRev is a wonderful
editor, I tend to move from it to Rev IDE quite a lot, for sometimes I like
Revs own debugger better, I like stepping thru code. This just my
development process to move from tRev to Rev Script Editor and back, I am
just glad that the process work quite well. Rodeo is Jerrys and Sarahs
response to Apple Stupid Decision regarding languages and the iPhone/iPad.
Other responses will probably follow. This is GOOD.

While I don't believe that RunRev is being negligent, I would like them to
stop the baking process and work on the dishes that are getting colder while
waiting for the dressing. We need bugfixes and we need feature parity at
least among Mac, Windows and Linux. Right now there is a mobile development
tool opportunity, they are throwing resources at it because there is a huge
market, we can only profit from this since more users equals more money for
them that equals more resources for them to use. Also they would need to
modularize the engine better and make it more self contained to make the
codebase easier to maintain and port to all different platforms, this would
benefit the Linux engine and all the others. There's no loss in such
initiative.

When Peter says things should be on the core product, I think he means, it
should be available when you have the core product. The difference is subtle
since the second phrase means that the features he want could be produced by
anyone but should be available. If we had a Free Open Source Movement here
(wearing by David hat now) we could fix many issues and ship some good stuff
to solve our problems while waiting for RunRev to fix theirs. While I don't
believe all the products could be FOSS since we all have bills to pay (I
have lots of them), I think everyone would contribute to some Standard
Library or set of libraries if possible.

In summary, I believe the community is getting bigger and even though this
makes some stuff harder since we no longer know each other personally like
we did many years ago, it also brings a lot of new people and ideas which is
great. The presence of paid addons is a symptom of some Rev weakness in some
areas and a positive indicator that there is a viable healthy development
market. Userbase is growing, and so are our needs and desires. Computing has
changed a lot in the lasty years, development tools are evolving faster than
ever. RunRev is a small team but they are very passionate, now, if we could
make just ONE of the core engineers migrate to Linux and be forced to use
Rev on Linux every day for two months, I bet all our linux needs would be
solved very quickly (scratch an itch philosophy).

My two brazilian reals cents, not as worthy as dollars or euros but prettier
(specially the 1 real coin).












-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.



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