Figured the field object would take a lot of replacing and good to know it is being steadily worked on. While like others we'd love full text features, I'd like to make a point about the development direction which is a bit different. It's about using HTML and revBrowser for text markup.
It is pretty clear that as we move more and more towards "web applications", what we now see as a text field becomes more and more like an iFrame or piece of embedded xHTML. It is also clear that with the Rev web plugin, developers will be making web pages with html content areas and areas taken up by the plugin. What this means is that in terms of top level design we are thinking about a world in which html text areas (aka text fields) communicate with Rev widgets / plugins on a "page". This is why I'd be more interested in getting the interoperability between the plugin and html areas fixed and maximizing the usage of revBrowser than simply adding features to the existing text field. We can get much of the formatting people want using revBrowser - we just need it to work really, really well so it "feels" just like a text field. This is also the reason why we need the ability to have the web plugin to talk to web page and vice-versa via JavaScript. That way we can design applications that use revBrowser for the desktop app and the plugin talking to the web page for the web site. That way we could / would be developing in a way which works with the tide of web apps - and if we were involved / aware of future plans regarding things like the text field could help steer it in the right sort of direction / while planning our products to take advantage of the features when they become available. 2009/6/28 Bill Marriott <[email protected]> > In short, Rev 4.0 (along with revServer) will be our most significant > release ever. It comes as giant leap after two years of steady, step-by-step > advances. I personally see it as the most exciting news since the > availability of MetaCard as a cross-platform solution for xTalk. This is not > to say a new field is unimportant, but hopefully this post explains that > this is about much more than just a pretty new logo. What I'd like to see is much more marketing and development transparency. I'd like to see a Rev development world in which as a developer working on web / rev mashups I can easily find out what the future plans in this area are and have my input. I'd prefer not to find out that the Rev Web Plugin lack certain core features a few weeks before release, and I'd like to think that by suggesting and discussing them with the community this input would help RunRev ensure the new products are as good as they could be given the resources invested. I don't think it is helpful that the "improve list" is only open to enterprise customers like myself. That makes sense for support but not for suggestions for improvement, and I don't think it is helpful to not have discussed the plugin anywhere as far as I can tell, not even to those like myself that paid out for a pioneer license. It's a great and bold step that the new low end development environment is going to be free. Its great that we have a web plugin, and the combination looks capable of attracting many new developers. What I am arguing here for is to involve these new developers in shaping the future of the product, and not have the existing model of dialogue restricted to those on the improve list and an inclination to use bugzilla feature requests. While the coments above about JavaScript or "devlopment transparency" may seem a bit geeky to some - its not. We need to build and attract a community of both geeks, budding geeks and newbies. And many newbies will have come from a world in which they know more about HTML, JavaScript and open source projects than they know about Rev. We want them to feel that Rev fits into this existing world of theirs, and one real cheap way of doing this is by laying out a public development time line, and encouraging that discussion with a bit more of an open source / crowd sourcing style to the marketing. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
