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. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution