First, thanks to all on this list who have visited, contributed to, and otherwise supported, revJournal.com. We're happy to host as many of you as will come.
As many of you know, we've added two new editors to our staff (Sarah and Bj�rnke --thanks so much for your awesome help!) in an effort to keep the content as fresh and as frequent as possible. Guests like Dan Shafer and Richard Gaskin have also made appearances, and the feedback from these cameos suggest that our readers find them invaluable, and want to see more of the same.
Thus, I'd like to elicit some more help/participation from you revGurus out there. I have a few article ideas I'll throw out to you in a minute, but I once again invite any and all of you to consider writing an article about: (a) something you have particular expertise in; (b) a Revolution tool or utility you use regularly; (c) relatively undocumented features of Revolution; (d) success stories of how Revolution has changed your business/life, etc.; or (e) programming in general.
Here are some suggestions for articles I'd love to see:
1. A database primer. One of the coolest things about the stack/card design is that you get a sort of simple database capability for free. But a true relational database is much more powerful, and I'd love to see an article about how Revolution can, and in some cases, should, be used as a front-end for a separate RDMS. What is a database? When/why would you use one? How to you connect to one from Rev? What are the strengths/weaknesses of the various RDMSs that work with Rev? Ideally, an extended series of articles on this topic would be extremely interesting and helpful.
2. OOP. A recent thread on the lists discussed adding true OOP capabilities to Rev. Very interesting. But I'd love more! What is OOP? What are its advantages? How does Rev's object-based paradigm compare? What are we missing? What do we stand to gain/lose?
3. CGI. Lots of questions on this, but this is sophisticated stuff for the inexperienced. What is it, why would you use it, how does Revolution support it?
4. XML. Basically the same comments made above about CGI.
5. Algorithms and Data Structures -- Although I plan on covering this on an as-needed basis in my revSchool lessons, wouldn't it be neat to have a periodic column covering how to implement a relatively standard data structure in Transcript?
Anyway, these are some non-exclusive suggestions -- I'm open to anything you'd like to write about, the only criteria being that it is somehow relevant to the Revolution developer community.
If you think you can contribute, or have additional ideas for topics you'd like to see covered, please contact me off-list at publisher @revjournal.com. As you can tell from the site content, our publishing schedule is on an as-able basis -- there's no real pressure or deadline other than wanting to get good stuff up for everyone as soon as reasonably possible. In other words, please consider writing even if you think you'll need a lengthy period of time to get a draft in to me.
Thanks as always for you encouragement and support.
Keep on revvin'!
Alan S. Golub
