/View is very exciting!!
Carl,
Do we have a hint yet how much it is going to cost?
At the company I work for we develop software that
is used by large corporations with thousands of users,
and my guess is they don't want to pay major dinero for
a license for each person. With VB programs in the old
days we could pay the devil, I mean MS, a bit o money
and then they didn't care how many times we distributed
our compiled programs.
Sometimes it's not even the money,
just the sheer headache of keeping track of how many people
they have using the program that gets to be unworkable.
I know that there are some fancy licensing things tools but
as our friend recently wrote, we like to simplicize.
Right now we are using the web more and more and that's good,
but some programs don't fit the web interface well, and
dynamic html can be both inadequate and suffering from
netscape/ie/etc. compatiblity problems. Played with Java some,
but not exactly happy with where it's at.
It would be nice under these circumstances to be able to ditch
VB exe's on the client side and use Rebol/View. But I have
no idea how much it costs or whether you might offer some
more flexible options in future. My boss would just be interested
in delivering an application, not caring about how we did it,
as long as it worked - of course he's not carrying a torch for
Rebol, either.
We have never had great cross-platform abilities in the past -
the web has come the closest to making that possible -
so rebol would be a nice bonus in the sense that you'd be able
to say to clients, sure it works on Mac and Unix, too.
(We are a Windoze shop, of course).
In any case, will there be any hope of having affordable distributable
rebol/view app for guys like us who sell to the corporate clients
but are not staff people at the corporations? MS largely ignores
companies like us. We are not making software for individuals,
nor are we staff developers at some corporate site building internal
functionality. We need maximum crossplatform and ease of
install and use and distribution at a reasonable cost and low
support/maintainence.
Anyway, I know that your focus is on enabling the people and
that means letting people make and run their own scripts, etc.
But people like my boss have no interest in that.
They are just trying to find a means to an end, the app.
Thanks for addressing my question,
-galt
p.s. I was so desperate to use Rebol that I hacked port 1433 to get into MS
SQLServer 7.
Please don't make me do that again, even though it was fun.
