On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Ruediger zu Dohna wrote:
> Kevin Miller wrote:
> > http://www.zdjournals.com/sun/9912/sun99c2.htm
>
> Clayton E. Crooks II seems to know more about MetaCard than most of us.
> "built-in support for databases such as Sybase, Access, and Oracle"?!?
> "multimedia abilities comparable to products like ... Macromedia
> Director"?!? Why did't anybody tell me? "it flawlessly integrates all of
> the tools into one seamless development environment"?!? We should tell
> XWorlds, who are working so hard on an improved developer experience!
I think the take home message here is that this review was published
in a UNIX-centric publication, and so you have to look at MetaCard's
primary competition in the UNIX market. While the current development
environment may not meet the aesthetic standards of some Mac users, it
looks pretty good compared with most of the UNIX alternatives.
> "The extended commands will provide a more full-featured object-oriented
> programming environment, which will allow development of larger-scale
> applications."?!? Cool... either Clayton is a lurker on this list and
> takes any suggestion made for granted to be included in the very next
> release, or he may have talked to Scott who told him things he only
> tells the press, but not on this list (too secret!). "OODBMS features,
> such as multi-user access, version control, and distributed data
> management, are currently being designed as well."?!? Wow!!!
Actually as far as I know the author never had any contact with anyone
here, and apparently did the review using only the Starter Kit. Not
sure where he got some of that stuff, but hey, I'm not complaining too
much ;-)
> Don't get me wrong, I really love to program in MetaCard and there are
> some very correct points in the article: "The MetaTalk language ... is
> the easiest, multipurpose scripting language that we've ever used"... me
> too! But this article sounds like an ad campain that is in parts very
> loosely tied to reality.
>
> If the things promised in the article are really coming within one year
> or so, then only terrible marketing could stop MetaCard from becoming
> one of the big players in IDE and scripting environments, and the others
> (Java, VisualBasic, Tcl, Perl, etc.) can only keep up due to better
> marketing (OpenSource is marketing with other means :-).
Fortunately the rather uninspring sales rates of the various add-ons
and development environments for those "Open Source" languages is
seriously limiting progress in those areas, evidence that the "free"
factor seems to be of more importance in their popularity than the
"open source" factor (something I've firmly believed all along).
There's no competing with Microsoft and their marketing of Visual
Basic, but MetaCard's chances vs. Java are looking better every day: I
recently read an article about software development trends which
included statistics on Java adoption which showed that over the last
couple of years the percentage of organizations "planning to use in
the next 12 months" had dropped from near 100% down to near the 30-40%
of sites already using it. This means that the Java cancer is no
longer spreading and may even be going into remission. Now we just
need to provide that more healthful alternative...
Regards,
Scott
> Regards
> R�diger
>
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********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
