Devin Asay wrote:
On Dec 8, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for an
engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?
A recent experience I had illustrates, I think, what David means.
Earlier this year I was writing a room scheduling application in Rev.
One of the features was that people who requested to schedule the room
had to be officially associated with the university. The obvious answer
was our enterprise LDAP server (open source technology). Rev can't
query LDAP directly, but BSD Unix (open source) has a utility called
ldapsearch. PHP (open source) can also do LDAP searches. I opted for
the latter, because that made my project easier to take cross platform.
So I found an open source PHP script that would do the search and
return the results as HTML (an open source protocol). I deployed the
script on our apache web server (open source) and used a Rev 'get URL
<url>' command to grab the results, which I easily parsed in Transcript
to get exactly what I needed. When my app verifies, from LDAP, that the
requester is officially permitted to schedule, it records the scheduled
event in a mysql database (open source).
I have other Rev apps that have similarly pulled together disparate
technologies quickly and easily into a Rev front end. In my opinion
this is an area in which Rev excels--as a rapid development platform
for writing front ends to other technologies. In effect, Rev increases
the power and reach of the latter, showing itself to be an
easy-to-learn "glue" for open source stuff that's often opaque to non-
propeller-heads.
That's a wonderful example, but if I read it correctly it seems you were
able to do what you needed on your own, without RunRev lifting a finger.
For myself, that's the sort of solution I prefer as well: the fewer the
cooks the sweeter the broth. I don't run their company and they don't
run mine, and we both like it like that.
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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