The Roadmap

[Bernard Devlin]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 7:00 PM Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

>
> If it were up to me I'd ditch it altogether.
>

 Whatever frustrations I have with Livecode they are vastly outweighed by
the things that it can do and the things it can do now that it couldn't do
a decade ago.

I don't think people appreciate what an incredible achievement it is.  As I
used to be a Lotus Notes developer, I can see the contrast.  IBM recently
sold their Lotus technologies to an Indian company for $1.8bn. Over the
last ten years a company the size of IBM could not successfully manage the
development of a cross-platform application development environment.   For
an entire decade IBM only added the v.9 release and fixpacks (and Notes 9.0
was actually Notes 8.5.4 but re-branded).

Notes used to exist in native clients for OS/2, Windows, MacOS.  IBM
jettisoned the native clients and moved to running the entire thing inside
the JVM.  It took IBM about 15 years to move from Notes 7 to Notes 10.
When I recently downloaded Notes 10 to do some programming on thousands of
emails (the very thing where Notes should shine) the client crashed
repeatedly on trying to import the emails.  Bear in mind that Notes even
has a menu action to import emails from a folder, so importing emails to
process the text is not even something that requires any programming, it's
that basic to the product.  Having moved from programming in C with all the
possible problems with pointers and memory allocation, Notes was moved to a
language with garbage collection and memory management and still the client
crashes doing basic things it could do 15 years ago.

By comparison in the last 10 to 15 years Livecode has added app delivery
for iOS, Android, Linux, Windows64 and HTML5 to Windows32 and OSX.  That's
more than IBM ever managed to do and a movement in the opposite direction
to that taken by IBM.  And as well as doing this Livecode re-architected
the engine.   IBM's major new feature over the last decade (XPages) looks
like it is now almost certainly going to be thrown away.  By moving to the
JVM for the development environment IBM was banking on delivering most
Notes apps as web apps.

Obviously the Notes servers do a whole range of things that Livecode
doesn't do.  But these server-side technologies were mostly in the Notes
product 15 years ago. Going back 15 years ago and Livecode was at v2.5.
Remember back then?  The clipboarddata was a new thing.  We didn't have a
built-in web browser, nor multi-dimensional arrays, nor unicode, nor the
datagrid, nor behaviors, nor widgets, nor xslt,  nor the enhanced liburl.
That's just off the top of my head.

IBM with all their resources and access to capital markets couldn't hold
themselves to their own limited roadmap.  Livecode has successfully moved
forward with a cross-platform solution when IBM couldn't do so.  And
without having $billions to play with.  They shouldn't attempt to hold to a
roadmap when the elephant in the room can't do it.  And IBM never allowed
businesses to use Notes for free nor did they open the source code.
Livecode did that and has a free edition which contains probably 99% of the
functionality of the most expensive license.

I think many of us lose sight of this small company's achievements.

Regards, Bernard