Re: [OT-Rodeo] Last minute call to get onboard with pre-realase conditions!

[Rodney Somerstein]

All of this looks very interesting. But what I can't see anywhere is 
whether or not buying in now would keep my price at $89/year or 
whether I would suddenly have to pay over $400 more next year when I 
renewed. The current deal looks great, but I can't see spending 
$499/year for Rodeo. It might be worth it, but not for something to 
just play with as a hobbyist.


So, does this deal lock in that price or does it go up at renewal time?

Thanks,

-Rodney
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Re: Interesting discussion on iPad content

[Rodney Somerstein]

My mistake in not clarifying.  The offer was for educational 
discount on pre-purchase of Rev-Mobile, so only applies to 
educational users.




That make sense, Marian. I forgot about the educational discounts. 
Many companies offer those on software. I just managed to pick an 
expensive hobby. I've been grumpy because I don't want to spend as 
much as is being asked. I want my toys when I want them, dang it. ;-) 
(That doesn't mean the world actually owes me those toys.)


My original plan for Rev was to develop software for playing a 
variety of board and card games - allowing users to specify the rules 
for the games so that it could support a wide variety. Of course, I 
haven't made much headway with that, but I have had fun playing 
around with it. The iPad seems like the perfect platform for such a 
thing and has me inspired again. That's part of where the frustration 
is coming from - this is just so close but just not quite there yet 
for me to jump on.


-Rodney
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Re: Interesting discussion on iPad content

[Rodney Somerstein]

Marian Petrides wrote:
FWIW, this amateur (OK, near amateur) finally bit the bullet on 
RevMobile when I got a special offer that dropped the price to 
something like $550 because I REALLY want to be able to develop for 
the iPad. 

OTOH, my subscription to Rev Enterprise is paid up until 2016 or so 
and I bought into On-Rev Founder, so I'm hardly a tight wad when it 
comes to buying Rev products.  That said, even I agree that the 
current _list_ price for RevMobile is prohibitive for anyone who 
does not already have a product ready to be deployed on the iPad.


Not sure what the answer is, just making an observation



I just do this as a hobby. As an enterprise licensee, I have put a 
LOT of money into Rev over the years, including an On-Rev Founder 
account that has mostly been sitting dormant. Hopefully, two years 
after that purchase there will finally be some upgrades to that 
product in the coming months.  I would definitely consider 
relinquishing the On-Rev stuff I have access to for something that is 
turning out to be much more compelling to me. Especially since I 
suspect there is more likelihood of ongoing development and 
improvements on Rev-Mobile than On-Rev. That is money spent that may 
eventually prove worthwhile but so far not really.


As far as I know, I never got any kind of special offer for 
Rev-Mobile. If I had some kind of offer to drop the price of Rev 
Mobile, I likely would buy into it. I guess it takes a lot more than 
being a multi-year Enterprise license holder (I show licensing info 
from all the way back to 2002 or so - I'm not sure that it was 
Enterprise until 2004-ish)  and an On-Rev founder to qualify for that 
kind of thing. (Or maybe I somehow missed it?) So I'm not exactly a 
tightwad when it comes to purchasing things from RunRev either, but 
this one just seems to push a bit too far. I hate to think what you 
must have done over the years to get such an offer.


I REALLY want to be able to develop for the iPad also, but...

I don't really care about the conference access, but I didn't see an 
option to just participate in the alpha and release without all the 
conference stuff, unfortunately. Don't get me wrong, the conference 
would be great, but I would gladly give up live access to that for 
access to Rev-Mobile. I would love something along the lines of the 
On-Rev founder access to Rev-Mobile. Even the option to buy into that 
for several years of updates without the conference stuff would have 
been more attractive to me. More up-front money but better return for 
someone not doing this professionally.


But, I'm instead looking at $800 for an alpha with a potential 
release later this year and then the prospect of paying more for an 
upgrade license each year than I do for RevEnterprise. So essentially 
I would get a product with less functionality than Enterprise (other 
than deploying on the iPhone/iPad) with a higher cost than 
Enterprise. (In all fairness, there may be an early upgrade price for 
Rev-Mobile each year as well, I just haven't seen it mentioned). So, 
I'm looking at at least $400/year in upgrade fees between the two 
products. Again, not exactly something for the average enthusiast, 
but with a cheaper buy-in option more people would consider it. And 
it seems that RunRev would benefit from having non-commercial apps 
produced with Revolution to show off as well as the specialized 
commercial ones that they often won't really be able to talk about 
with other customers.


Anyway, I've hopefully made my point. The goal isn't just to 
complain, but to agitate a bit for something more reasonable as an 
option for people who aren't considering Rev-Mobile vs. spending a 
lot more money for commercial development. For that latter group, 
Rev-Mobile is probably worthwhile at the current price. They can 
probably write it off on taxes in many cases. Being somewhat locked 
out of participating in a very compelling enthusiast product due to 
an insistence on purely commercial pricing does chafe a bit, though.


(I'll try to keep future replies a bit shorter now that I've ranted a bit)

-Rodney
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Re: Interesting discussion on iPad content

[Rodney Somerstein]

Heather Nagey wrote:


Thought you folks might appreciate:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/the-ipad-needs-its-hypercard.html



That is somewhat interesting and I noticed that several Runrev fans 
have started putting comments there. (Too much of that and people 
will start thinking it is a concerted advertising campaign or 
somesuch.)


However, the article seems to be a call for an affordable equivalent 
to Hypercard for the iPad. That is, something that would let the 
"amateurs and professionals", as the article says, have a really good 
tool for creating content. RunRev has this for the Mac and PC, 
especially with RevMedia. Unfortunately, no such equivalent is 
available for the iPad.


The iPad is such a perfect platform for that kind of tool. 
Unfortunately, the tools seem to be targeted at serious developers - 
expensive, annual fees, etc. - not the person who wants to 
experiment. (I'm not just talking about RunRev here) Apple is also 
doing their part to keep the average person out by forcing most 
people to learn Objective-C to develop for the iPad and not allowing 
executable code to be run on the iPad.


Right now, it seems like the best bet for the average person is 
developing a web-based application if they want to target the 
iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch market. Not so satisfying since that option 
requires an Internet connection and doesn't really allow data to be 
stored on the iPad.


I understand the reasoning behind the Rev-mobile pricing. But trying 
to convince anyone that Rev-mobile is for the amateurs with the 
current pricing model is pretty much a nonstarter, I suspect. 
Hopefully, after the development phase is done, something along the 
lines of RevMedia (or even a reasonable target like RevStudio) will 
be possible to produce to target that audience as well. Maybe there 
can be a split for that market with similar restrictions to RevMobile 
as in the RevStudio & RevEnterprise products.


The trick would probably be to figure out what can be left out of a 
RevMobile-lite - you wouldn't be running full databases, etc. on 
there. It could certainly be restricted to running on one platform 
per license, such as iPad only, iPhone/iPod Touch only, etc. (If it 
is even possible to internally set a flag to do that or at least 
automatically generate an error when someone tries to run it on the 
wrong kind of hardware.) There could be a slight upgrade fee to 
produce universal i-apps that can run on both. Maybe there are other 
and/or additional restrictions that would let such a thing make sense?


-Rodney
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Re: Dependence on Programming Experts

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thank you for your many replies to my questions.  I'll try to take your word
regarding your programming language recommendation, but I really don't yet
understand why you or Rodney feel this way.  Object orientation has always
made complete sense to me  -  the encapsulation of very small functions and
their assembly into larger components.  Traditional programming describes a
sequence of events, detail by detail instead of an assemblage of simple
parts.  This seems counter-intuitive to me.  As I understand it, Transcript
is not object oriented.  It may have syntax that resembles English, but the
construction of systems is what I am aiming at and it seems natural to
define a system in terms of itty bitty parts that combine together to make
bigger and more complex things.  Think of the Model T car.  Pretty useful,
but really not all that complex considering it is made up of merely 300
fairly simple parts.  Looked at a part at a time, creating a Model T seems
quite within practical limits.



Greg,

I agree that it would be nice if Revolution was truly object 
oriented. Right now, it is "kind of" object oriented. It uses many 
concepts from OOP (object oriented programming), but doesn't go all 
the way to including ideas such as inheritance.


So, you can take all of those itty bitty parts and combine them 
together the way that you think. What you can't do is easily define a 
new kind of part and have it inherit all of the capabilities of some 
other part. So, if you need a new widget that does things slightly 
differently than some other widget, you can use some of your previous 
work, but you essentially end up having to rewrite your new widget 
from the beginning. In a true OOP you could simply start with the 
original widget and make the few changes that you needed.


Due to its English-like syntax, Revolution, the language (previously 
called Transcript) is easier for many people to work with than the 
other more foreign seeming languages. Given the fact that you can 
graphically define the pieces that you are putting together and then 
fill in the details (scripts), it is an easy way to get started. Were 
you to go to another language, such as say, Python, you might get a 
fully object oriented language, but you would then have to start at 
an even lower foundational level. In most languages, you have to 
learn to do everything with just text first. Then you start learning 
to use graphics. Here, you can use either text or graphics pretty 
interchangeably. That is a big part of what makes Rev easy to use. 
Combine that with the fact that you can simply add new parts as you 
go along and test immediately and you have a really dynamic 
environment to work in.


-Rodney
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Re: Dependence on Programming Experts

[Rodney Somerstein]

Greg Smith wrote:

You really haven't thoroughly read what I have written.  I have stated that
I am not opposed to learning to program, but, rather, opposed to having to
learn the skills with inadequate foundational learning material.


I did overlook this in your original posts. I agree that Revolution 
is lacking in the documentation department. It has a lot of 
documentation for people who are familiar with the environment, but 
not for those just getting started. Rev really needs a good tutorial 
that goes beyond just the basics that it covers now.



I'm not asking for a tool that does everything for me.  I'm asking for a
computer language that lets me translate my organized thoughts and
imagination into useful bits that, when assembled together, form working
components of a total working system.  And, it would be helpful if, along
with such a language, came an insightful translation of the equivalent of
words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and finally, whole stories  -
especially if the language claims to be English-like.  If English is the
analogy, then the analogy needs to be explained, piece by piece, concept by
concept.  Maybe this is what does not exist.


Again, this kind of material is lacking for Revolution. To a large 
extent, it is missing for pretty much every programming language in 
existence. Revolution may actually come closer than most languages 
and environments to doing what you want. It is missing the in-depth 
tutorial material. What Rev might need is an equivalent of the "... 
For Dummies" series of books. (I hate the title, but the series has 
some good books.) It needs something that starts from the ground up, 
assuming no prior programming knowledge, that holds a new users hand 
in learning all of the basic features of the language and environment.


What currently exists in Rev can be somewhat overwhelming for the new 
user. This is easy to forget for people who have struggled through it 
already and are now using the software productively. A lot of those 
folks were aided by having used HyperCard or some other xTalk 
environment in the past. Rev, like any other programming language, 
does have some concepts that don't have direct analogs in a spoken 
language. You need a way to tell the computer what to do in detail. 
It simply can't understand what you want without that detail, the way 
people can when you speak to them. The real problem in that 
translation between human speech and programming is that the two are 
not equivalent. When you tell a person to do something, they 
understand what you mean. A computer has to be told not only what to 
do, but how to do it - step by detailed step.


I am not an expert on Rev myself. I've been hanging out here for a 
few years, playing with the software and reading messages on the 
mailing list. Since I just play around, I keep debating whether or 
not I want to keep renewing my license each year. I find the software 
and the mailing lists to be fun, creative environments and keep 
renewing so far. In another couple of months I have to make that 
decision again. I'm not sure whether I'll go with it or not this 
time. But, Rev is, even given all the work it takes to get going, 
still one of easiest, most productive programming environments you 
are likely to encounter. If Runtime Revolution keep working to 
improve the user experience, it might eventually get closer to what 
you want. I still think it is probably the closest that you will find.


-Rodney
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Re: Dependence on Programming Experts

[Rodney Somerstein]

Dan & Rodney:

O.K., now, just as I was salivating over the potential usefulness and joy of
using Squeak, Rodney comes along and throws water all over me.  Which is it?
Who is right?  I haven't yet had time to look at the actual Squeak language,
but I did see that incredibly direct and simple "kids" example of using
Squeak over at SqueakLand, or is it SmallTalkLand?  EToys.  And then there
is the integration of all the functionality that the Alice environment
offered, brought over into SqueakLand, or whatever it is called.  Is it all
too good to be really true?

My initial impressions of this environment were that it teaches new users,
even kids, to apprehend, to comprehend the concepts involved in programming,
so that, after those things are grasped, then the cryptic programming
terminology can be introduced which, if those are introduced first, confuses
the heck out of anyone wanting to learn to program.  Even if a programming
language is English-like, what is needed beyond and prior to learning lines
of "code" is really understanding sequences of events and why they need to
be in the order that they need to be in to get the machine to respond
properly.  Right?



Greg,

Smalltalk and the Squeak implementation in particular are good first 
programming languages. However, Smalltalk tends to be very 
specialized and it is hard to produce an application that you can 
give to other people to install. If you just want to learn and have 
something you can play with, then Squeak isn't a bad choice. As Dan 
stated, though, it is hard to produce applications that you can then 
deploy elsewhere.


The main problem, in my view, is that Smalltalk environments are 
pretty much unlike anything else you will encounter on your computer. 
Yes, you can learn programming concepts. But, you will then likely 
end up learning another language afterward to produce usable 
software. Unfortunate, but that is the current state of the art. As 
Smalltalk has been around for a long time, that is unlikely to change 
anytime in the near future.


Programming itself is actually pretty easy. You just have to take 
small steps. Understand that you won't sit down and in one night 
understand how to do everything. If you work through tutorials in 
your chosen environment, you will learn basic concepts in pretty much 
any language you choose. After awhile, you will be able to combine 
those concepts to create very involved applications. Programming is 
only hard if you look at it as a whole. The pieces are generally 
easy. The terminology, which you rightly complained about, comes 
along with that learning.


-Rodney
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Re: Dependence on Programming Experts

[Rodney Somerstein]

Greg Smith wrote:
It is the required use of languages like these that force users like 
us to become "dumbed down". Need we submit to this kind of 
humiliation?


Greg,

It isn't the users that need to be "dumbed down". Rather, it is the 
environment that Jacqueline was referring to. You are essentially 
asking for someone to create a simple (and for want of a better term) 
dumbed down environment that will allow you to create exactly the 
kind of programs that you want. All without having to spend the time 
learning to program. There is no such thing. Unless someone else has 
the exact same vision as you and wants to develop such a tool using a 
programming language, it will never exist.


You aren't looking for a smarter tool. You are asking to avoid 
spending the time learning what is necessary to create the tool you 
want. A tool that is limited to doing what you want is "dumber" than 
a general purpose programming environment such as Revolution. By 
"dumber" I mean that it is more specialized and removes many of the 
features and adds others to make it easier to do just what you want.


Could Revolution be an easier environment to work with? Absolutely. 
It could include better tools for a lot of what it does. Even from 
the developers' standpoint it could be a better language, such as 
implementing true object oriented features. However, it currently 
seems to be, at least for most of the people here, the best general 
purpose environment for creating a wide variety of programs.


What you are asking for doesn't exist at this time. Unless you can 
show the folks at Runtime Revolution that there is a real business 
case for what you are looking for, they probably won't give it to 
you. Their customer base is already too varied and there are too many 
demands on them to add features already for them to produce the 
environment that you want.


-Rodney
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Re: Dependence on Programming Experts

[Rodney Somerstein]

My take is that Rev is not likely to be an easy, malleable environment in
which to create the kinds of things your obviously fertile mind is already
dreaming up, let alone the things that will spring forth from those already
rich ideas.

Just my opinion, of course, but I think you'd find more shoulders on which
to stand (i.e., components, objects, concepts, tools) over in Smalltalkland
than you will in RevWorld.


Wow! We couldn't differ more on this opinion, Dan. For someone who 
doesn't want to do much programming, Smalltalk is probably not the 
environment to go to. Environments such as Squeak will require him to 
program pretty much everything. No nice graphical starting point the 
way there is in Rev. And, it is REALLY unintuitive to anyone who 
hasn't drunk the Smalltalk Cool Aid. Just figuring out what mouse 
clicks do takes some work. Smalltalk is essentially an operating 
system.


No I will give you the object oriented nature of things in the 
Smalltalk world. That is really the one place that it really excels. 
But when it comes to anything else other than object oriented 
programming, which isn't his goal, I wouldn't steer anyone to 
Smalltalk.


If some of the Smalltalk folks could create a nice environment that 
makes it easy to target a variety of OS platforms, I might be 
convinced otherwise. However, the only attempts that I've seen tend 
to be very pricey and still result in Smalltalk-like, rather than 
familiar, environments to work in.


The truth is, what this person wants to do will require programming. 
Rev is probably the friendliest environment currently available to 
get going with. In part, due to the the nice folks on this mailing 
list. RealBASIC might give it a run for the money as it has some 
pretty rabid, helpful users as well. Not as cross-platform or quite 
as easy to use, but still another place to steer a developer 
wanna-be. And he is a developer wanna-be. He just doesn't know it or 
want to admit it yet. ;-)


-Rodney
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Re: Sort-of OT: Learning Python

[Rodney Somerstein]

Is he building double-clickable graphical aqua apps? I can use 
Python. The confusion is in figuring out how to set up wxWidgets (or 
tkAqua), which GUI builder to use, which IDE, etc., etc.


In any case -- if he knows of a set of instructions to get from here 
to there, I'd love to know where they are.



Geoff,

Unfortunately, such instructions don't exist. I've been dabbling in 
Python with intent to really dive in for a few years now. There is a 
fairly friendly and helpful Python list for the Mac that can probably 
help you. There is a wxPython list where people can help you. There 
is also a PythonCard mailing list where people will help you. There 
is no resource that I'm aware of that ties all of this together 
nicely.


Also, while Bob Ippolito has done what seems like a fairly nice job 
on py2app, the standalone builder for Mac Python, he seems to hold a 
very low regard for readable documentation. He wrote the tool for 
himself and makes it available for the good of the community. But, 
people should just know how to make it work as far as I can tell. He 
will answer questions, but the answers usually assume that you have a 
sufficiently deep knowledge of Python to understand them. The problem 
seems to be that Mac Python is an all volunteer effort and no one has 
volunteered to write comprehensive documentation tying Python and 
py2app together so that a real newbie has a good chance of 
understanding it all. It is understandable that no one has written 
the same documentation for the Mac for wxPython and PythonCard as 
they aren't Mac specific.


The best approach, as far as I can tell is to first of all learn 
Python. You do this by first installing Python 2.4.3 from the build 
available at http://www.python.org/download/mac/. This page is a 
basic page describing how to get started and why to install Python 
rather than using the one built into OS X. Then, use any decent book 
on Python to learn the language itself.


Next, I would learn to use py2app. Unfortunately, the only good 
resource that I know for learning this tool is to join the MacPython 
SIG mailing list - 
http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/pythonmac-sig. You will 
get all the help you need there with a little asking.


Then, learn wxPython for developing GUI apps. You can probably do 
this at the same time that you learn PythonCard. Again, join the 
PythonCard mailing list and probably the wxPython mailing list for 
help.


If you happen to find a resource that shows you how to create a 
standalone hello world app in Python on the Mac, please post about it 
here. I've never seen such a thing but would love to find one.


-Rodney
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Re: Those Yahoo Groups? Just Say No.

[Rodney Somerstein]

Judy writes:


I agree, Bill.

Do you have a good alternative?  I am the moderator of a Yahoo group on
Katherine Swynford, the sister-in-law of the English 14th century poet
Geoffrey Chaucer.

If I could make a good case for a switchover, I'd make it...


You can start similar groups at Google, which seems to be the lone 
holdout when it comes to giving information to the government. Try 
http://groups.google.com. I run a mailing list there and it has 
worked well. The only downside is there are no files or calendar 
sections in the group. But for mailing lists, Google works well.


-Rodney
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Re: Help needed downloading a file to a folder

[Rodney Somerstein]

By default, the filetype is set to "ttxtTEXT" which causes Rev to make
the Finder think that all files it saves are text files. The easiest
solution is to use:
   set the fileType to empty
before saving any files. This forces OS X to make up it's own mind
about the file type, absed on the extension.


Thanks Sarah. I'll definitely use the set the fileType to empty 
trick. I'm trying to write something that will work cross-platform 
and the less that I need to special case, the better. Keeping it 
generic is probably the better idea, even though everyone on the Mac 
would use Stuffit on such a file anyway in all likelihood. The real 
question is why does Revolution save files with a filetype at all 
these days? It should only do so under OS 9 as I understand it.


-Rodney
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Re: Help needed downloading a file to a folder

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks again for the help Andre. I was spending time with the docs, 
but unfortunately they don't seem to tie things together very well. 
For instance, I found the load URL command and therefor realized that 
it cached the file to memory. Even the callback message part was 
clear. However, I couldn't easily find how to write the file out to 
disk after that.


I don't expect to have problems finding the zip creator code. I'll 
just look at another zip file. I still haven't quite gotten the hang 
of when OS X needs a creator/filetype code set versus when it will 
just work based on the extension. I download PC zip files all the 
time via a browser. I was guessing that Mozilla doesn't set the 
creator/filetype codes, but maybe I'm wrong on this.


-Rodney
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Re: Help needed downloading a file to a folder

[Rodney Somerstein]

Hi Rodney,

You might be interested in "How to download data from the internet", 
one of my tutorial stack you can access through Tutorials Picker.
Tutorials Picker is a plugin available (as all other tutorials) on 
http://www.sosmartsoftware.com/?r=revolution_didacticiels&l=en




Thanks a lot, Eric. I will definitely take a look at this tutorial. 
It sounds like just what I need.


-Rodney
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Re: Help needed downloading a file to a folder

[Rodney Somerstein]

Andre,

Thanks for the quick answer. Using the correct URL does seem to help. ;-)

It seems to work OK now. Though as you state, I don't want that long 
pause while the file downloads. Of course, the next obvious question 
is how do I use the load URL command to the same thing? From what I 
can tell, load URL puts the file into memory. I then need to save it 
to disk but have no idea how to do so.


Also, I noticed that instead of ending up with a binary file when 
using put URL, I actually ended up with a text file with a .zip 
extension. It did unzip with no problem. I'm guessing I have to do 
some kind of magic to make the file into an actual zip file for Mac 
OS X?


Thanks again,

-Rodney
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Help needed downloading a file to a folder

[Rodney Somerstein]

I am trying to create a button to download a file from a web site. I 
don't seem to be having much luck getting this to work. This is under 
OS X. At best, I seem to get a 4k text file. I should be getting a 
5MB zip file. As far as I can tell, this should download the file to 
my user directory.


Here is my current script:

on mouseUp
put URL "http://cosmosui.org/index.php?p=download&f=Cosmos_Alpha.zip"; \
into URL "binfile:/Users/rodneys/Cosmos_Alpha.zip"
end mouseUp


It seems like this should be simple. Please help me figure out what 
I'm doing wrong. I've looked through the documentation quite a bit 
but haven't found anything that tells me exactly what to do to 
accomplish this.


Thanks,

-Rodney
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Re: [OT] Re: Why isn't Rev more popular? [Mailing List]

[Rodney Somerstein]

You can also view this list archives in web format in one of several
places: lists.runrev.com, Gmane, and the Mail Archive. My preferred
way of using the lists as threaded archives is to use gmane and my
news reader, Xnews. In any of these approaches you could have the
content that we're all here for and not have to deal with email.


Thanks for mentioning this Mark. I just posted a message suggesting 
that this list be mirrored on Gmane. I didn't bother to actually 
check to see if it was already there. I may switch to using that to 
cut down on my email volume.


-Rodney
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[OT] Re: Why isn't Rev more popular? [Mailing List]

[Rodney Somerstein]

Bob Hutchison wrote:

The only better solution to this is NNTP. Unfortunately, USENET is 
pretty much dead because of spam and finding a good news reader 
these days is hard (actually, some ISPs are no longer supporting 
NNTP). BTW, if you are on windows, check out Agent 
<http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php> if you want to see what I 
think is a fabulous mail/news reader (they combine the two)... I 
wish this was available on the Mac.


The problem with web based forums is a) their functionality sucks 
(yes, this is my opinion, and that's the point); and, b) you have to 
go to them. Going to something is fundamentally the wrong way about. 
This is why email, news (despite the spam), and weblogs are either 
so entrenched or such active areas of development.


I agree with you, Bob. I REALLY wish that this list was available as 
a Usenet group. As a matter of fact, it would probably be pretty easy 
to have this list mirrored to gmane which hosts many other such 
programming mailing lists. Then people who prefer could use a good 
NNTP reader (I use Thoth on the Mac most of the time for this) and 
those who don't want the change could just keep using email. That 
would be the best of both worlds for everyone.


-Rodney
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RE: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks again for your help Xavier. The article on graphs looks very 
interesting and is definitely a useful idea to know about. I'll keep 
that and the devarticles site bookmarked for future use.


Your TAOO technique looks to be an advanced extension of the kind of 
thing I'm thinking about doing with the scripts for my game engine. 
I'll take a look through the BotWar game and see what I can make 
learn from it when I get the opportunity.


I'm not quite sure what GIM does yet, but that will hopefully become 
clearer as I investigate as well.


-Rodney
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RE: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks for all of the ideas, Xavier. This is exactly the kind of 
thing I was looking for. As I mentioned previously, I don't have a 
formal computer science background. I have read enough so that I am 
at least vaguely familiar with lots of different things which is why 
I figured that there are probably better ways to accomplish things.


I would love to take a look at the stack you mentioned for the BotWar 
game. I suspect that I can mine it for techniques.


From other ideas that you mentioned, I have been thinking along the 
ideas of more of what you call verbobject handlers so that each 
command isn't quite as large. It just seems that command scripts 
would become really cumbersome to maintain and modify if they get too 
large. That isn't to say that I would be reluctant to add new 
functionality to existing commands. As long as new arguments are 
optional, it wouldn't break existing functionality. I think it is 
easier for non-programmers to understand a greater number of simple 
commands than a small number of complex commands.


As for your references to dynamic scripts and associative arrays, are 
there any pointers you can give me to learn more about these 
techniques as they would apply to Rev?


Also, what specifically do you mean by a pro-active selective bot 
editor? Is this just an editor that knows about the commands and 
helps the user with command completion or choosing the commands from 
menus so that it can prompt the user for the specific arguments 
needed?


Thank you for your help,

-Rodney

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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Geoff,

The virtual card table that you propose would be relatively simple 
compared to what I am proposing. It is really just a first step along 
the lines of what I am hoping to create. Granted, it is more open 
than what I would provide, but the engines to do what you want and 
what I want have a lot of similarities. Where mine gets even tougher 
is the wide variety of components I want to be able to support. Decks 
of cards don't necessarily consist of 4 suits of 13 cards. There may 
be several decks. Some decks don't have suits at all, but cards with 
lots of text. Others might have 10 suits with 20 cards each. Playing 
pieces might need to stack rather than just exist separately. The 
possibilities are endless. I suspect that as people started using 
your system you would get requests for similar kinds of features if 
people familiar with the games that I play were to get hold of it. ;-)


I do want to have rules built in so that the system can help enforce 
them. Why require people to remember sometimes very complex rules 
that are there to make the game work effectively when the system 
itself should be capable of handling them. Why should I have to draw 
3 cards manually each time if a game requires it? If I hit the draw 
cards button in such a game, it should automatically give me 3. Not 
just enforcing rules, but handling scoring for games that have scores 
is also important.


I'm curious how, without codifying rules, you handle dealing cards 
face up/down as desired? Would you require an extra click to flip the 
card? In real life it is one smooth motion. If the game knows how the 
card is supposed to be dealt it isn't an issue at all. If you have a 
UI solution I'm very interested as I will probably use it myself. ;-)


Your ideas are pretty interesting though. It is fascinating how often 
several people seem to come up with similar ideas at the same, or 
nearly so, time. And yes, I agree with you that Rev is well suited to 
such a task.


-Rodney
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Re: [OT] Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

[Rodney Somerstein]

Dan,

I have to say that in looking at Ruby today I came to a similar 
conclusion to yours. I think Ruby is probably best loved by people 
switching from Perl. It seems to have many of the same 
characteristics, such as many ways to do things and ways to 
abbreviate the code so as to make it harder to read. I found a site 
that had a good comparison of Ruby and Python and the Python code all 
seemed very readable while I had a hard time understanding the Ruby 
code. Note that I'm not a Python expert. I've played with it just a 
very little bit over the years, but the code seems very readable for 
anyone that has programmed in just about any language.


Ruby on Rails looks to be a tremendously effective approach to create 
Ajax (Asychronous JavaScript and XML) applications. For the best 
known application using Ajax, take a look at Google maps if you 
haven't seen it. This is an exciting time of possibilities when you 
think of what kinds of applications we are likely to start seeing on 
the Web. We will finally start seeing more Web applications that feel 
like standalone apps without requiring a player of some sort to be 
embedded in the browser. The downside right now is that Ruby on Rails 
does require using Ruby. I suspect Python will catch up soon if it 
hasn't already. I don't know whether Revolution can already 
effectively play in this environment or not.


-Rodney
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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Cubist writes,


sez [EMAIL PROTECTED]:

It seems to me that as the language grows it will get
progressively slower if I'm just continually adding IF-THEN
statements or adding to one large CASE statement.

   Exactly how many language-tokens are you going to *need* for this thing?
Hmmm... in no particular order:


.
.
.


   That's twelve different language tokens you'll need, IMAO. Can anyone else
think of any others?


Well, I could use just 12 or so language tokens as you state. Then, I 
have to provide a lot more functionality to make this work, such as 
ways of chaining those together with various kinds of programmatic 
logic. Otherwise, I have simply created a very specific purpose 
descriptive language that doesn't allow a whole lot to be automated. 
You seem to have a good handle on what kinds of games I want to 
implement and the difficulties involved. If I go this route, rather 
than adding more commands, each command gets more and more complex as 
I want to add features.


For example, DefineThing makes sense to define a game element, such 
as a card. But then, I need to define details of that card, such as 
suit, value, color, etc. And I need to be able to combine that card 
with others to become a deck. And the deck needs to have details such 
as number of cards, number of cards remaining before reshuffle, 
played cards, discarded cards, etc. That is mostly meta-data. What 
happens when I get to the token for DefineRule? These are so broad 
that allowing implementation of auctions and scoring, as just two 
examples, would both be very different rules.


It seems that a better approach as I've been discussing this is to 
create a library of commands (basically scripts) that can be called 
to build a script. Ideally this would be Transcript calling the 
scripts rather than my parsing through a file and calling each script 
myself. That allows easier transition for game developers to move 
from simple implementations to more involved ones.


I suspect that each game component should also have scripts specific 
to those components. For example, a deck of cards can deal to a 
player's hand, play a card face up to a spot on the board, or discard 
a card. There are more behaviors, but this is a few simple examples. 
It seems easier to me that the deck knows how to do this rather than 
have a big command that has to know how to deal with all kinds of 
game components where possible.



   Naah. Rev is a consideration regardless, because somebody has to do the
hard work of writing the code which implements all the commands in 
the library. Rev is way-cool for that hard work.


I agree. That is why I'm asking on the Rev mailing list. ;-)


   Naah. The command file is just a list of character strings which trigger
various pre-written handlers. The 10-line limit isn't a factor, becuase *you*
(the developer) are the only one who ever has to deal with *scripts*.
Basically, load a command file into a field or variable, and let 
your handlers massage said file; no problem.


As I've stated, this approach works for very simple implementation of 
a game where the users have to handle all of the rules. As soon as 
people want to get beyond this, either I write a full-fledged 
scripting language or the game developer does this in Transcript (or 
Python or...). Without coding logic of some sort, the game developer 
would be very limited as to what they can do. I can then focus on 
adding common functionality and people designing specific games can 
focus on the one-off rules.



   German-type games are a *mess*, as far as conversion to a machine-friendly
form is concerned. There's far too many conditional rules and arbitrary
thises & thats.


It is pretty hard to generalize, but I have a few pages just listing 
common game mechanisms and meta-data for components that games need. 
This includes random number generation (dice usually, but spinners 
etc. also), card handling, auctions, betting, etc. I'll pick a 
starting point and go from there. I'll probably deal with simple card 
games (Lost Cities) and tile-laying games (Carcassonne) first, then 
proceed from there. Doing this will progressively build up a library 
of functionality which will then be added to on an ongoing basis. Of 
course, there are a lot of infrastructure pieces such as broadcasting 
and receiving moves, matchmaking, chatting,etc. that have to 
implemented as well. I will never implement every possibility, which 
is why I want developers to have access to a full-featured language 
if possible. When the developer wants to go beyond using simple logic 
to hook these pieces together, then they would need a license for 
DreamCard, etc. to go farther.


Thanks for the input and feel free to find problems with what I'm 
saying here. It definitely helps me get this stuff figured out.


-Rodney
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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Can you provide a built-in library of commands, functions, and 
properties for game scripters? With this, your users could do 
powerful things - say, change the color of all pieces, or set the 
permissible moves for a piece - without having to use lengthy 
scripts. Most of the scripting would already have been done for 
them. (It would be quite a bit of work to write a library for game 
scripters, but it has to be easier than trying to implement an 
entire programming language for them.)


Jeanne,

As you have already seen if you are following this continuing 
disjointed, rambling saga, I have kind of come to the conclusion 
already that this would be the best way to implement things. Using 
this method also makes it easier for people to transition from simple 
game modules into much more complex ones without having to learn 
everything from scratch. They simply keep using the same commands, 
but start taking advantage of Transcript features also.


In Rev, this does mean that I would be building scripts on the fly 
and this is where I start running into RunRev imposed limitations on 
standalone apps.


And I second Geoff's suggestion to get in touch with Kevin and 
inquire about whether you can make special arrangements as to script 
limits.


I will do so, but I've been trying to think through exactly what I 
need before asking. It would be nice if people could use at least 
some features of Transcript in their scripts without having to buy a 
DreamCard license. But what could/would they realistically be limited 
to? I see a need for loops, variables, and IF-THEN statements at the 
very least. Of course each object in the game needs to be addressable 
as well. I need to keep my proposal simple since I'm looking to do 
this at essentially no extra cost (or minimal cost).


Given the structure of Rev stacks, these scripts would probably have 
to be importable into almost any kind of object in order to work. 
Cards might need to have specific behaviors built in, etc. Of course, 
it would be possible to address all of this from a script at the 
stack or card level, but that might be a bit of a mess. I would 
basically have each element in the game try to call a script with the 
same name as the element - for example, playingPiece1 tries to call 
the playingPiece1 script which would exist in the card. That would 
enable me to import the commands to just one object. Does that seem 
like it might be a useful way to limit things; that is, restricting 
scripts to just one level of the message hierarchy?


-Rodney
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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks for the input, Dan. Can you tell me a little more about the 
table driven approach you were mentioning? Are doplay and playTheGame 
two different commands, both of which take the same arguments? Or is 
doplay the user command and playTheGame is the script that I would 
call after determining which command was issued? I'm guessing the 
latter is what you were explaining to me.


This approach might be able to eliminate some of my concerns with 
writing a parser. Namely the fact that if someone wanted to go from 
the simple world of creating a game module using what I provide to 
something more full featured they would lose the ability to use what 
I had written. With this approach, especially if the internal script 
names and external command names are the same, they could still call 
my scripts even though they would have to learn Transcript or some 
other language.


It would also eliminate the limitations of creating scripts from a 
standalone as I would not be doing so. I would simply be calling 
scripts that I had already written. It would mean that someone who 
wants to do *anything* more than what I provide would have to buy a 
DreamCard license and start learning Transcript in depth.


RBScript sounds interesting, but I have been led to believe that 
REALBasic doesn't work as well for non-Mac programs. Have they gotten 
to the point of producing great code running on Mac and Windows 
without having to jump through a lot of hoops? For that matter, has 
Rev really gotten to that point? What about Linux?


What do you think of the approach that I mentioned in another message 
of making the scripting language pretty much be composed of just 
methods/scripts in whatever language I choose? This eliminates the 
need for writing an interpreter altogether. I simply use the 
arguments passed in with the call to the method rather than parsing 
each line. I could provide a simple shell script for people to write 
their "programs". In Python this would mean the appropriate imports 
and such to make the game scripts available. If someone then wants to 
go beyond that language, they are already working in the correct 
programming environment.


This approach, unfortunately, would seem to rule out Rev as an 
environment due to the limitation of scripts that come from outside a 
stack in a standalone to 10 lines. Since any game that I can think of 
would take more than 10 lines to implement, it means that everyone 
would need a DreamCard license. Again, since I want this to be a free 
system, requiring someone to pay for a DreamCard license probably 
isn't feasible.


Another consideration is that if I switch away from Rev, I will need 
to switch to a language other than my scripting language being used 
to write the base application. Unfortunately neither Python or Ruby 
seem to offer any easy way to write standalone applications with a 
GUI and make the application easily deployable for non-developers. 
So, I suspect I would end up needing to switch to embedding Python or 
Ruby in Java to allow for this. Since both languages already offer 
Java implementations, this would be easy. I'm not sure whether Ruby 
is really viable, but I've heard it mentioned a lot so I have just 
started looking.


I will take a look at YACC. It is something that I have been aware 
of, though I have no clue how to use it. I imagine, as you say, that 
just looking at it may help me clarify how to do what I want in a 
language.


Thanks,

-Rodney
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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Yes, by all means write an interpreter! It's not that hard and fun 
too, with no script limits. I did this in Hypercard once. I needed 
to munge huge text files for translation between databases, so I 
created an 'action processor' with a simple language that could save 
its code as a resource in the stack.


Just make it human-readable, and you can even use some of the 
'forbidden words' used for Transcript. Most of your 'interpreter' is 
going to consist of CASE or IF-THEN statements.  You're going to 
need some time brainstorming the structure --but are basically just 
redirecting your new commands to rev handlers. Error checking and 
validation is up to you. And of course since you're writing it, it's 
extensible at all times.


Thanks Stephen. This is just the kind of feedback that I was hoping 
for. I know there are general purpose tools for writing parsers 
outside of the Rev world. I've seen mentions of things like Lex and 
YACC over the years. I have no idea how to use such tools, though. My 
concern with your approach is two-fold:


1) It seems to me that as the language grows it will get 
progressively slower if I'm just continually adding IF-THEN 
statements or adding to one large CASE statement. Again, I'm looking 
for pointers toward easy to understand but better methods for doing 
this.


2) Error checking and validation is again something that I know have 
been generalized outside of Revolution. If I can use something that 
already exists to help facilitate this, then so much the better. That 
would mean it is much quicker to add new commands to a language.


I am considering using XML as the base for the language. I can use 
tags which can be validated by a DTD or Schema. Arguments can be 
handled via attributes for the tags. Revolution already has built-in 
tools for helping with this. I only see this approach working for 
people designing game modules. Someone who wants to write a game 
player AI would definitely have to learn Transcript or whatever 
scripting language I ultimately use.


This also has added security, as you completely control what happens 
in your world, as opposed to using the rev script system - and 
message path - to interpret your scripts.


I'm not that concerned about security. As I mentioned in my 
previously lengthy message, there will have to be a program specific 
command language for creating games. This will be a very secure 
language. I don't want the average person to have to resort to 
learning a more generic language such as Transcript, Python, or Ruby. 
However, I think that I need access to such a language for people who 
want to help me extend the system or who start chafing at the 
limitations that I impose on them due to my implementation. I want to 
design as wide open a system as possible for people to extend. I 
don't want to just tell people that if they want to implement their 
favorite game, they have to fully learn a complete programming 
language.


However, I've just realized that if I do use a language such as 
Python or Ruby for the scripting environment, the command language 
could be supplied as a library of methods for that language. People 
could then simply learn the basics of the programming language and 
use the library of commands that I supply for most of what they want 
to do. Only people who want to go beyond what is built in would need 
to learn more than the basic structure of the language in question. I 
like Rev/Transcript and would love that to be the environment I 
implement in. Due to the artificial restrictions placed on 
stand-alone applications, that may not be viable without requiring 
people to purchase at least a DreamCard license.


As I've been typing this message it seems more and more that creating 
a library of commands, rather than a language itself, might be the 
better way to go about implementing this. If I do so, that might 
eliminate Revolution as a real consideration. If Rev could at least 
generate a script from a command file that I imported, then I could 
work around this. More sophisticated users would just use Transcript 
in DreamCard and call the scripts that implement those commands. Less 
sophisticated users would simply construct command files. I'm 
concerned that the 10 line limit on scripts created in standalones 
might be the real killer for me here. Without the way to generate 
scripts of arbitrary size from a command file, I don't see any way of 
connecting the two worlds. If someone wanted to go beyond the command 
language I provide, they would have to jump into the implementation 
language completely and ignore my cumbersome language parsing. I'm 
not sure how much of what I had already done could be made easily 
reusable for people who want to go beyond the basics.


-Rodney
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Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions so far. Robert's suggestion 
about requiring anyone who wants to create game modules to purchase a 
Dreamcard license won't work. This is an open source/free project I'm 
embarking on. Using Revolution makes the open source aspects less so 
as fewer people will have access to the source since it requires a 
commercial tool. However, I'm willing to live with that if I can work 
around the other limitations. Requiring people to have a copy of 
Dreamcard to write a game AI is probably feasible as few people will 
likely do that anyway.


Xavier's suggestion to write an interpreter is pretty much what I 
expect would be required if I do the project in Revolution. Yes, a 
highly structured language where each command consists of a verb 
followed by arguments doesn't seem that tough to write. Two issues 
with this for me, though. First of all, I know there are such things 
as grammatical parsers that make this kind of work easier. Though I 
have no idea of the methodologies involved in creating/using such a 
thing. This is a little bit of a barrier for me. Simply using a 
series of if-then-else statements to parse a command file will likely 
be slow and I need to find a better way if I go this route. It seems 
that XML might be viable as Rev has built in functionality for this 
and I am already familiar with XML. Being able to use a DTD or schema 
to validate a command file would greatly simplify my work by 
eliminating the need for me to write the code to do so. The problem 
with this approach is that it is limited to what features I can 
support in the language/XML application. I expect I would never write 
a language capable of creating a game AI and would have to fall back 
on people creating such in Transcript, requiring them to at least 
license Dreamcard.


Now on to Alex's reply

btw - I don't know what you mean by European-style modern games. 
I've previously thought about some of these issues specifically for 
card games (see RevOnline under user alextweedly for TriPeaks - this 
includes a PlayingCard library which you are welcome to use or take 
bits from as you wish). I've also done, but not yet posted, a 
Cribbage game - and it's definitely in the future plans to extend 
the number of games handled, and to make them networked so multiple 
people can play against each other and/or user-written stacks and/or 
the built-in rather basic game play). [ but I haven't resolved the 
questions I raise below about allocation of intelligence and game 
knowledge between the server and client - so that's on hold for now ]


I will definitely take a look at your PlayingCard library. I suspect 
it would save me a lot of work in implementing this kind of thing 
myself. What I mean by "European-style modern games" is a kind of 
game that is called by many names. They are also known as German 
games, designer games, and family strategy games. They tend to be 
about 2 hours or less in length, focus on non-war based strategy, 
have a theme of some sort, and use custom playing components. They 
can be card games, board games, a combination of the two, or other 
things such as dice based games. They are not the stereotypical 
American roll the dice and move the marker around a track kind of 
game. There is a strong and growing group of hobbyists who play these 
kinds of games in Europe (primarily Germany), the US, and throughout 
the rest of the world. In Germany, the premier annual game show in 
Essen draws well over 100,000 people to attend.


I know that Revolution can easily handle the multi-player aspects 
via communication with a central server that broadcasts the 
information to everyone involved in the game. I'm not sure if this 
server should be written in Rev or something else such as PHP.


I'd do it in Rev - and probably use socket communication rather than 
http. That will make it easier to handle the asynchronous nature of 
some games.


When I brought this up previously, someone suggested that I use a 
central server for communication rather than peer to peer. Using 
something such as PHP would save me a lot of implementation work. I 
don't really need the server to maintain the game state in such a 
case, the clients can do it. The server would be primarily to allow 
people to connect and then broadcast the game information. Each 
client would need to have a copy of the game module for the game 
being played. Obviously there are a lot of design considerations that 
need to be thought through regardless of whether I use an existing 
server technology (I'm definitely looking for suggestions) or roll my 
own. I don't know that using sockets for communication necessarily 
means creating my own server.


A large design decision is whether to make the server generic, or 
make it be scriptable for each game. Indeed, you could go to the 
other extreme and make *only* the server be scripted, and use a 
general purpose client. In that design, the client has no knowledge 
of the

Re: Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

By far the easiest way to handle this would be by exposing 
Transcript to your users. Send an email to the rev crew directly 
regarding your needs. The ten-line limit in executables is an 
artificial limit designed to prevent you from creating your own 
development environment in Rev and distributing it. It happened with 
SuperCard many years back. In the past, the rev crew have expressed 
at least a willingness to consider a separate license specifically 
to cover a situation like yours.


Thanks for the advice Jeff. I agree with what you say as being best. 
I am creating a free program, so I don't want to spend more money on 
this hobby. I've already been paying for my Pro license each year. 
That is already more than I should spend on this product. I suppose 
that it wouldn't hurt to ask just in case they are willing to let me 
do it at no extra charge. Personally, I suspect it might end up 
selling a few extra licenses when people see what they can do so 
easily and I tell them where to go for an environment that would let 
them create programs of their own like that.


But, short of that, does anyone have any other suggestions?

-Rodney
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Looking for suggestions/advice

[Rodney Somerstein]

I have owned a copy of Rev for several years and am trying to decide 
if it is appropriate for a project that I want to do. I haven't done 
that much work with Rev, just played around with it. I have a pretty 
good background in HyperCard, so the basic concepts of Revolution 
make sense to me. I have dabbled quite a bit in other programming 
languages and am pretty familiar with object oriented programming and 
programming in general. I am not a computer science major, so there 
is a lot that I don't know as well.


Now, on to what I want to ask for help with. I want to develop an 
application which is a design/play environment for board/card games - 
particularly European-style modern games. This program should allow 
for people to create an add-on module to implement a particular game. 
Initially, it will just allow people to import graphics for playing 
pieces, cards, etc. and set up some very simple rules, such as how 
many cards to draw at one time, whether cards are public or private 
information, etc. Eventually I would like to allow the program to 
completely handle the rules of the game including score keeping, 
enforcement of all game rules, etc. I will start out very simple and 
add complexity as time goes on. The first iterations will require the 
user to do everything manually just to make sure I can handle 
dragging pieces around, dealing cards, etc. Then I will start to 
automate each of these things.


I know that Revolution can easily handle the multi-player aspects via 
communication with a central server that broadcasts the information 
to everyone involved in the game. I'm not sure if this server should 
be written in Rev or something else such as PHP.


I know that Revolution can make the graphical aspects of the program 
much easier than more traditional languages. I'm still not sure about 
being able to easily zoom in and out (scaling) the view of the game 
board, but I suspect it can be handled dynamically in Rev as well.


For my real dilemma, though. I brought up some ideas about this a 
couple of years ago looking for advice. People seemed to indicate 
that this should be a workable project in Rev. Now I'm looking for 
ideas as to how to go about implementing things.


Here are my questions/concerns:

This application is going to require a scripting language. My 
understanding is that Transcript isn't a viable scripting language 
for this purpose (correct me if I'm wrong, please) because there are 
limits as to how much can be done on the fly from an imported script 
rather than one built into the stack. For example, I don't think that 
I can have a user write a script that could be imported as a module 
into a Revolution stack and executed without limiting that script to 
10 lines. Since a game could have several hundred pieces including 
cards, game boards, scoring tracks, decks of cards, etc. that need to 
have rules set for them, how can I go about this? Do I create XML 
tags to allow this? Do I write my own interpreter that Rev then uses 
to execute the scripts? I've never actually written a programming 
language, but I know there are better methods than one big if-then 
structure to parse through a line of code to figure out what it needs 
to do. Any suggestions on how to easily learn what I need to do here 
would be appreciated.


I would like to allow the games to have computer players as well as 
human. That ratchets up the requirements for a scripting language 
even more. Is this something that Revolution is well suited to? Or 
should I really be looking at other languages such as Java? I could 
let users script things via Python or Ruby if I used Java. I know the 
downsides of developing in a language such as Java rather than 
Revolution. I just have this nagging feeling that it may actually 
make for a better cross-platform development system than Rev for what 
I want to do. I'd be happy to be disabused of this notion.


Thanks for any help/suggestions that you can offer.

-Rodney
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Re: [Slightly OT] - Of Ajax, Ruby on Rails, and 37 Signals

[Rodney Somerstein]

But I keep wondering why this stuff isn't being driven by Rev 
instead of by Ruby, which is a text-only development tool.



Easy. Ruby on Rails is free and open source. Much easier to get the 
developer nerds of the world excited about something that makes their 
life easier and is free than a commercial product.


That's just a fact of life. Similar reasons for why Python is much 
more popular than Rev. It isn't a matter of capabilities and ease of 
use. It's a matter of what is easily available, known, and free also 
helps.


Of course, the fact that text-based environments lend themselves to 
team development projects much better than Rev probably also helps. 
The fact that only one person can work on a Rev stack at a time is a 
big downside to trying to use Rev for projects that take more than 
one person. I know that everyone could work on their own stack and 
have it call other stacks, but due to the interactive nature of stack 
development, this just doesn't feel as clean as working on a source 
file, submitting it to a source control system, then having someone 
build it for testing.


Not to mention the fact that Ajax, which the article says Ruby on 
Rails gives easy access to, utilizes existing web technologies such 
as JavaScript. This is instead of requiring developers to scrap 
everything they already know to switch to Rev. Instead the developers 
just learn one more environment that fits seamlessly into their 
existing development process.


I really like Rev, but unfortunately there are some environments that 
it doesn't fit into as well as more traditional languages. It has a 
huge learning curve compared to more traditional environments. For 
one person projects or a very small team working closely together, 
Rev can be a better environment to work in. But it requires a major 
shift in mind set from most other languages/development environments. 
It requires depending on RunRev to add features/bug fixes, and it is 
a commercial product.


All of that being said, as a person who programs for a hobby, rather 
than for a living, I enjoy working with Rev more than the other 
languages/environments than I have looked at. Revolution definitely 
has its place and can help me finish projects much more easily than 
other environments. But, I come from a HyperCard background (at one 
point when working in evangelism at Apple, I was responsible for 
dealing with both HyperCard and Applescript as well as other 
development environments and I was the lead for a fee-based scripting 
support group at Apple). This has made understanding how to use 
Revolution much easier, but I still struggle a lot with how to do 
some seemingly simple things easily and efficiently.


Sorry about the extended rant, but you did ask. ;-)

-Rodney
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Re: Kevin Miller's scripting conference chat log

[Rodney Somerstein]

During our last scripting conference, Kevin Miller gave a 
presentation on Revolution 2.6 and answered questions from the 
participants about Revolution and future plans. I have posted the 
transcript of that portion of the conference, and you can download 
it here:




You will need a program that can open .rtf files to read it.

The remainder of the conference was Richard Gaskin's presentation on 
the message hierarchy. The transcript of that portion is contained 
in the downloadable scripting conference stack as usual.




I have tried to download this several times and get a file not found 
error. Can you please correct the above link or re-upload the file so 
that it is downloadable?


Thanks,

-Rodney
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Re: Rev. User Groups in the USA?

[Rodney Somerstein]

I live in the Philadelphia area and would become a member of a local 
user group if such existed.


-Rodney

--
Rodney Somerstein Meditation... it's not what you think.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend;
  inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
  Groucho Marx

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Re: the IDE

[Rodney Somerstein]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
There's a lot of code in the IDE, so I wouldn't begin to know all of 
the things it does. But to get a feel for which messages are 
intercepted you can do two things:

- Read the frontScripts and backScripts that are active when
  the IDE is running.
- Use UmbrellaMan to log events for you:
  
These sound like good suggestions, Richard, but shouldn't this info 
be documented somewhere? Is it?

Given the current state of the documentation, I'm having lots of 
trouble finding definitions for built-in commands, much less 
something like this. So it could be there and I just wouldn't know. 
If it isn't documented, has there been any discussion of adding this 
to the documentation?

-Rodney
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Re: Why wait for Inheritance in Revolution? Want 1000 more features now?

[Rodney Somerstein]

Xavier,
XOS sounds interesting to me. If you release XOS, and it is all that 
you say it is, I would certainly donate to help keep it going. The 
non-object oriented nature of RunRev is one of the things about it 
that bothers me a bit, so anything that pushes it in that direction 
is a plus for me. Being a hobbyist, I don't see a need to donate 
without having something to show for it. I don't doubt your good 
intentions, but it was tough enough for me to scrape together the fee 
for my RR license renewal. Given this, I won't be donating until I 
have something usable from you. If funding is what you need to get 
you working on XOS, then I hope that you are able to find it.

Your other tools look very nice and I will give at least PropsN2O a 
try soon. Maybe the excuse of trying a neat tool will get me coding 
again instead of just thinking about it. I have no problem paying a 
suggested donation or shareware fee to a PayPal account for something 
that I do use.

As for feedback from users, I think that asking for donations to a 
PayPal account would give you some feedback. If you don't get any 
donations, then you could take the feedback to mean that people 
either don't value your work or that you just haven't advertised it 
enough. Of course there are other interpretations as well, such as 
people just don't feel that the amount you are asking for is right, 
etc. Given the the fact that RunRev add-ons/sample code is mostly 
freely shared in the community, asking for a donation from users is 
likely to be more successful than shareware. Make sure to put 
something in the readme file as well as in the about box. I don't 
always look at about boxes, but I always at least glance at readme 
files.

I'm not sure what needs to be done to get more links added to other 
RunRev user sites. As a user who occasionally looks for such sites, I 
would love to see more links.

-Rodney
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How to set the layer of draggable objects?

[Rodney Somerstein]

I have 12 groups of objects (each consisting of a rectangle with a 
label) on a card and need to set the layer of each one that I click 
on to be higher than all of the others. These groups are set up to be 
able to drag them around the card using the script from the Tip of 
the Week section of runrev.com with the addition of one statement to 
set the layer of the group.

local lMouseDown

on mouseDown
   set the layer of me to top
   put true into lMouseDown
end mouseDown

on mouseMove x,y
   if lMouseDown then set the loc of me to x,y
end mouseMove

on mouseUp
   put false into lMouseDown
end mouseUp

on mouseRelease
   mouseUp
end mouseRelease


The group does move to the top layer. However, sometimes the group 
doesn't seem to detect that I have let go of the mouse button and the 
movement of the object continues to track my mouse.

I thought that maybe I could simply put an if statement in the 
mouseDown handler and check to see if the group was currently the top 
one. The only way that I can think to do that is see if the layer of 
the group is less than the number of card parts. This doesn't seem to 
solve the issue of detecting the mouseUp.

Does anyone know a way around this?

Also, I would like to set the layer of the group to be higher than 
any other group, but no higher than the buttons, or possibly other 
objects later, that are on the card. How do I go about doing this? I 
can't simply set the layer to top to accomplish that as the layer of 
the rectangle will then be higher than any buttons as well. Any 
suggestions here would also be appreciated.

Thanks,

-Rodney
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