> Wondering if anyone has personal experience using REAL Basic > and Revolution? I did see some discussions on this list but > they're all pretty old. At first glance, REAL Basic appears > to provide very similar functionality to Revolution and a few > things (like a report > writer) that aren't in Revolution, at least without an extra > cost third party add-on. > > Also possible that this isn't an appropriate place for such > discussions, and I'm fine with that.
You'll probably get a different response over on the REALbasic list. Functionally, they couldn't be more different. RB is much more like a Visual Studio type product, and to get the most out of it you really need to commit yourself to learning all the nuances of traditional type programming, just as you would if you were going to learn a language for using Visual Studio. Revolution lets you design first, use an English-like language, add functionality, test without recompilation. Both products produce applications that can run on multiple operating systems. Rev supports deployment through a web plugin as well. And then, there is a server-side Rev platform called On-Rev. REAL's report writer is personally interesting to me. From RB 1 to RB 5.5, I managed REAL's international sales. There was an incredible demand for support for a report writer, especially for Crystal Reports, when RB was the "Visual Basic for Mac". There wasn't a REAL Server back then. That came later after REAL failed to acquire our Valentina DB product, and instead built a server around SQLite. REAL's report writer came after we announced and shipped Valentina Reports for REALbasic. There are also a few other reporting solutions for Rev, as there are for REALbasic. Most of those solutions are built from the native platform, unlike Valentina Reports, which is developed in C++ with native wrappings. The amount of add-ons and extensions for Rev is on the increase; I haven't seen much new out there for RB. They started supporting some of their 3rd party supporters by placing them in the REAL store - later than the RevSelect program at Runtime. Although both products produce native applications, Rev isn't trying to mimic Visual Studio. If you want a Visual Studio type experience, then RB is good; but then again, there is also Visual Studio, and if you are okay with .net, Mono is what you need for cross platform and .net. But Rev doesn't do .net. I think if you evaluate both products with an eye of its support, new features and market influence over the last five years, it will give you a good idea of their potential for the future. Rev is for developers who are willing to take a risk on a less traditional programming paradigm; but Rev developers also benefit from the features and support that you do not get from others. Best regards, Lynn Fredricks President Paradigma Software http://www.paradigmasoft.com Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server _______________________________________________ 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