On 14/10/01 11:16 pm, Andrew Bush <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> The first of our independently commissioned comparison articles is now >> available. By popular request, the first article compares Revolution in >> detail with REALBasic. Check it out: >> > Its a good, well written article, which makes many good points for the > comparison. I do feel though that maybe the REAlbasic version of the > application could have been written in a slightly different way, which would > have reduced the number of lines of code required (although the total would > still be greater than that required by transcript), made the code a lot > clearer and easier to read and also (I suspect) speed up the application > rather a lot.
Sure, but improvements could have been made to the Revolution code too. Transcript is a fast, compiled language and this article shows that. There are always going to be areas where one or other tool is a little faster or slower, but overall performance should at least be in the same ball park. The article made many more important points: time to develop, ease of debugging, number of platforms supported, readability of code, etc. Indeed the speed of the final application has hardly been mentioned in the article. > After a 10 minute (honestly :) glance at the code, I can see some areas that > maybe could have been done differently. I'm sure some improvements could be made, but I doubt these are all that extensive, nor that they would make a substantial difference to the outcomes posted. As the developers of Revolution, we can see improvements which can be made in the Revolution code, indeed there are probably several different ways it could be written and we could have sat down and tested them all. We didn't do that - the application was written by a developer with reasonable experience, and that is the real world. The main point is that a developer, who is reasonably versed in *both* tools, has developed a clean application in both of them. Its a "real world" test, it shows the relative easy or difficulty an experienced developer has in both tools. So the results do hold up. Sure, if you have years more experience with one tool or the other you might be able to do it a bit better with one, but that would bias the results too. Geoff was aware of the potential for such bias, and so worked hard to try to avoid it. We didn't hand tweak Geoff's code, and Geoff asked both developer communities for help at key stages of this project to check that he was on the right lines. > Im a contract developer, with not much interest in which IDE is 'better', I > code in c,c++, REALbasic, applescript <g> and various other scripting > languages. > > I have been lurking on the Runrev list for some time now as I have a project > coming up that I suspect will be best done on revolution, mostly because of > its cross-platform requirements. (it will also require connectivity to > mysql, which is one of the reasons why Ive been lurking for so long :) > > I currently use REALbasic for many of my smaller projects (most of which > could be done in revolution as well) mostly because I found it before I > found revolution and no matter how straight forward the ide there is time > saved by sticking to what you already know. > > I guess what Im saying is that although Im not interested in which IDE is > 'better', I do feel that for the sake of fairness maybe some (fairly basic) > changes could be made to the REALbasic application, Id be happy to discuss > them further with the developer who built it. Please do! We're interested in any changes, and indeed Geoff is interested in revising the paper when we ship 1.1. However, great care has been taken and this discussion has thus already been had before we posted the article. Minor tweaking on both sides aside, given that both applications are "clean" to real world standards, I'm willing to bet that the results will stand as fair. Regards, Kevin Kevin Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.runrev.com/> Runtime Revolution Limited - Power to the Developer! Tel: +44 (0)131 718 4333. Fax: +44 (0)1639 830 707.
