Andre wrote:
I wrote a really big piece today. I sent to the list but the list
rejected saying it is to big (16k, awaiting moderator approaval).
That's a silly arbitrary limit. But the post is valuable and there are
so many more people here than there that rather than inconvenience the
lot of them I've taken the liberty of re-posting your message here as
you originally intended, broken into three parts to work within the
silly limit here....
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
_______________________________________________________
Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com
--=========================================================--
From Andre:
Boa noite, Friends,
I sent this first to the use-revolution list but I think it was reject
for being a big email.
Again on this list we touch the topics of browser plugins, flash export
and other possible web related features. People from the RunRev team
came forward and asked us for feedback and requests and many answered to
this call. This email will be my thoughts on the topic of web and rev,
it will be a very long email and I'll touch many topics but in the end
this will remain an opinion piece and others may have a different point
of view. I hereby apologise for my lack of english grammar skills and my
typos, even before they occur. English is my third language, portuguese
is my first, cursing my second and english my third. I'll first talk
about flash, web browser plugin, java bytecodes, I'll be against them
all, then I'll talk about what I think is the future and that it can be
done now if people help.
It's been mentioned before that Revolution should export it's stacks to
flash, I don't think this is feasible not only by a technical standpoint
but also for a theoretical point of view. Flash is a multimedia
presentation authoring tool. Runtime Revolution is a turing complete
application building language and IDE. Revolution has features such as
database access, tcp and udp networking, native GUI support which don't
map well to Flash. I am not even touching topics such as the unique
nature of stacks, cards, objects, customprops and the message path. I
don't think the feature set and the mind set behind those two apps map
well to each other, so therefore, I recommend against such solutions but
the SWF format is open and anyone is encouraged to try some experiments.
Other possible solution was the creation of a web browser plugin, this
is certainly more attractive to me than flash and more feasible. The
idea of a plugin although is very hard because not only RunRev team
would have to support lots of platforms (at least linux, windows and mac
os x) but also each browser for each platform (safari, mozilla,
explorer, opera), the amount of resources to create such thing would be
enormous. Also what is the real difference between downloading the
Revolution Player and having a browser plugin? Both will be about the
same size but the plugin will be confined to the browser canvas (okay,
it might be able to spawn its own windows too) and the Revolution Player
one will be running on the "real thing". As far as my experience goes
with Revolution Player, if any user needs to use my software, he will
gladly download the player, he acknowledges no difference between
downloading a player and a plugin. The player is less work for RunRev as
a windows player will work in every windows, a browser plugin will
depend on the browser version. So I'd rather use the Revolution player
than a plugin.
The idea of making the engine generate java bytecodes is very
entertaining because this would enable us to use revolution to build
servlets for our web server end, midlets for our cellphone or pda
programming and applets for those that really want to be confined to a
browser canvas. I don't know much about java bytecodes although I put a
book specially about generating java bytecodes from languages that are
not java in my Safari bookshelf. The idea is very nice except for the
fact that the WHOLE RUNTIME REVOLUTION ENGINE WOULD NEED TO BE
REWRITTEN, sorry for the all caps, but we needed emphasys. To create
such bytecode thing, a new engine would need to be built, we would not
be able to re-use none of the C/C++ code. A new engine from the scratch.
We don't have the resources for that either, writting a new engine?!
Just pick everything scott raney did, all the things runrev added during
the last years, throw it all away and build it again just for using java
bytecodes. I don't think we can do that now.
Okay, my rant is finished, let us talk about new things, about
Revolution and the Web in the way I see it.
(continued in Part 2 of 3)
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