Great Product! Ready for prime time?

[Brian]

Hello, After spending the last day or so looking at MetaCard and playing with the Starter Kit, it looks to be a terrific product.  With it's simplicity, decent speed and best of all, portability to many platforms!  I have a few questions:   1) I have a need to develop an application that could store potentially thousands of rows of data, but want to store the data on the user's local hard drive without a large DMBS system.  Are there any extensions available for MetaCard that serves such a purpose?  Preferrably a single additional library that is as equally portable as MetaCard (maybe MetaKit http://www.equi4.com/metakit/ and MetaCard could be integrated...).  I understand MetaCard's database is only recommended for up to 1000 rows.   2) In my application I would like to use a Table/Grid, Tree and split-pane objects in the interface.  I realize MetaCard doesn't provide native support for these, but is there MetaTalk code available that uses the existing widgets and builds compound-widgets to arrive at a Table/Grid, Tree and Split-pane widgets?  In Tcl/Tk there are widgets developed in Pure Tcl/Tk that use the existing widgets in Tk in such a way (tree, split pane, even spin buttons).   3. Is it possible to develop an application in MetaCard that functions as a simple Web Server?   In short, I would love to use MetaCard to do my applications development, but it appears to fall short in database robustness and 3rd party widget and functionality extensibility.  Are there any plans to address these shortcomings in future MetaCard releases so that it could better compete with products such as: VB, Access, FileMaker Pro, PowerBuilder, Delphi,  etc. ?  Is this even a market MetaCard is interested in?  Given the rise of Linux (which is lacking in easy-to-use development tools) and the return of the Mac, MetaCard with it's portability, flexibility and straightforward easy-to-learn scripting language could become incredibly popular!   Thanks! Brian