Hi Jaqui,
I don't want anyone to miss this. I had just spent about two weeks
learning JavaScript for exactly the reasons you've just cited. (smile)
Thank you for the timely, informative explanation. This does mean that
on-rev has to be the hosting site for the webpages, however, does it
not? In other words, a client could not hire one of us to create a
website that they plan to run on, say, GoDaddy. In that case we'd
still have to use php or JavaScript for interactive features. Correct?
I still don't have a really good picture of the process since I've
done this so few times.
Joe Wilkins
On Apr 17, 2009, at 6:21 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:
I have found this whole subject so far over my head that I'm
embarrassed. Can anyone sight some sort of reference that just
"might" get me off of my desktop. I am soooo uneducated on this
topic. Simply stated, what's this for, why is it needed and what
does it let us do that we can do now? There MUST be others who are
just as much in the dark.
It's kind of hard to explain if you don't create web pages or have a
familiarity with how they are written. But in a nutshell, web pages
written in pure HTML are static. Whenever you see a page that does
something dynamic -- buttons with different rollover states, data
that changes depending on live user input, dynamic content of any
type -- those actions must be scripted into the page using a second,
scripted language like JavaScript or PHP. The scripted language is
integrated into the same page as the HTML code and the server
interprets the scripts and shows you dynamic content.
Up until now, anyone who wanted dynamic content on a web page had to
learn one of those other languages. What has just happened is that
Runtime has figured out a way to allow a web server to work with our
familiar xtalk, and allow that to be embedded into a web page
instead of one of the other languages. This is big stuff.
The server needs to be set up in a particular way to allow this, and
as of now, only Runtime has that setup in place. They have made
their web service available so we can take advantage of this new
capability. Their setup pretty much matches industry standards in
terms of features and capability -- except for this remarkable
scripting feature which no one else has. There is nothing to lose by
changing to Runtime's web hosting service, and everything to gain if
you want to write web pages using the language we know and love.
For years now, the Rev engine has always had the capability to work
with a server as long as it was set up as a CGI service. This is a
complicated and tedious task in general, but once it was set up it
works well. (This method isn't going away, by the way. It will still
be functional for those who want it.) However, with the new HTML-
integrated capabilities, CGIs are no longer needed. You can write
HTML and Rev script in the same web page and your users will see
content based on whatever your scripts do. You don't have to worry
about any of the complexities of CGIs because none of that matters
any more (permissions, engines, Apache installation, missing
libraries, line endings, etc. All moot now.)
Anyone who's had to work with the old-style CGIs will find the new
method liberating. One of the hardest things to do was debug a CGI;
it was very much like working with HC version 1.0 where the only way
to know what a variable contained was to put its contents into the
message box. If you got a script error, it was up to you to figure
out the problem, because the clues were sparse if they existed at
all. That's all over with now. RR provides a live debugger that lets
you step through the scripts on a web page just as though you were
working in a stack. That alone is worth the price of admission for
web page authors.
For me, I haven't seen such a cool thing since I was gobsmacked by
the ability to run a stack from a remote server in one line of script.
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
Joe Lewis Wilkins
Architect
Director of Product Development for GSI
760-738-1721
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