Thank you for a thoughtful, and comprehensive, response to my post. I am not saying that HyperCard is better than Revolution. Revolution is almost 10 years newer and does many wonderful things. I do believe that HyperCard "got it right" on many things: overall elegance, ease of use, rapid learning, almost bullet-proof reliablility, powerful reporting, etc. All at a really good price. The fact that Revolution supports Unicode, sockets, front scripts, etc. is nice but I would gladly trade them for some of HC's more basic virtues. It is a measure of how right HC got it that it continues today over 7 years since the last development work was done to it; over five years since its owner abandoned it.
I like Revolution a lot. I am waiting for Revolution 2's promised Report Builder. I began porting my HyperCard work to Revolution with the understanding that a good reporting capability was coming. Building reports in Transcript is not my idea of a report builder. You were critical of "tools based solutions" but isn't that is what Revolution is all about? Revolution is a tool that allows us to build real programs without learning "C". Our customers should have a good tool for building reports. The design work is done. The blueprint for a good reporting system already exists. It is Reports DataPro. This is the best combination of power and accessibility ever combined with an XCard. Duplicating this functionality on a modern XCard is not trivial and there may be many Revolution users who do not need it (I also suspect there are many people who looked at Revolution and did not proceed further because it lacked reporting - I was one of those a year ago when I looked at version 1.1.1 and moved on). Your option #1 is the best (an integrated reports engine, built by the Revolution team, completely compatible with the evolving Revolution). Option #2 (build and sell the reports engine ourselves) is also a viable choice but not as good as #1. Option #3 (include a hundred canned reports with the business system) is the least desirable (our systems are all about empowering the users). Based on the promised features for version 2, I believe reporting is a priority for the Revolution team (Option #1). If this is not the case, I would like to know (moving on to Option #2). You spoke at length about ROI and, of course, this is what drives a business. Would I be hopelessly out of line with the following assumptions: 1. A report builder with Reports DataPro functionality could be produced for under $100,000 worth of programming hours. 2. A good report builder could be sold as a Revolution add-on for $499 to $999. 3. A report runtime could be sold for free to ???? 4. There are 50 Revolution developers and over 100 end users that would purchase such a report builder within a year of its introduction. Sincerely, Paul Looney _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
